Once Around the Web, Please

• Chris Ewan, whose debut crime novel, The Good Thief’s Guide to Amsterdam, recently made it into British bookstores, talks with pseudonymous interviewer “Crimeficreader” about his favorite protagonists in this genre (Philip Marlowe and Dave Robicheaux), his frustrating previous effort to pen a literary novel, his dayjob with a law firm, and the intellectual challenges of burglary. You’ll find their whole exchange here.

• How does one cook Lamb with Dill Sauce à la Raymond Chandler, you ask? With a healthy dollop of cynicism, a soupçon of manly violence, and a copy of Mark Crick’s Kafka’s Soup right at hand, according to January Magazine. Read more here.

• Today marks what would have been the 99th birthday of spy novelist Ian Fleming (he died in 1964), creator of the fictional Agent 007, James Bond. As Garrison Keillor reminds us in his always entertaining Writer’s Almanac:

[Fleming] wanted to be a diplomat, but he failed the Foreign Office examination and decided to go into journalism. He worked for the Reuters News Service in London, Moscow, and Berlin, and then during World War II he served as the assistant to the British director of naval intelligence.

After the war, he bought a house in Jamaica, where he spent his time fishing and gambling and bird watching. He started to get bored, so he decided to try writing a novel about a secret agent. He named the agent James Bond after the author of a bird-watching book. He said, “I wanted the simplest, dullest, plainest-sounding name I could find.” He made Bond a much more heroic version of himself: a member of the British intelligence service, code name 007, with a license to kill. In the first Bond novel, Casino Royale (1953) ... James Bond gambles with Nazis and takes them for everything they’re worth.

• Who are the most-anthologized writers of crime short stories? Steve Lewis has a pretty astonishing rundown in his Mystery*File blog. And the answer to that question? Apparently, more stories by Edward D. Hoch have been included in anthologies than those by any other writer. Completing the top five: Michael Gilbert, Ellery Queen, Agatha Christie, and Bill Pronzini. Click here for more.

• Speaking of short stories, Ross Macdonald biographer and January Magazine contributing editor Tom Nolan interviews famed book editor and bookstore proprietor Otto Penzler on the subject of the satisfactions to be had, and the money to be made (or not), in writing abbreviated criminal yarns. That piece can be found in the Criminal Brief blog.

• What are the best Elmore Leonard novels? “In the right bar, that question could start a rumble,” wrote Dwight Garner in yesterday’s New York Times Book Review. “But Mark Reiter tackles it with elegance and wit in his recent book ‘The Enlightened Bracketologist: The Final Four of Everything,’ which he wrote with Richard Sandomir and Nigel Holmes. According to Reiter, the novels that make it to Leonard’s final four are “Hombre” (1961), ‘Swag’ (1976), ‘LaBrava’ (1983) and ‘Killshot’ (1989). It’s hard to quibble with that list.” Indeed, LaBrava would have been my choice. Garner’s complete squib on this subject can be found here.

• Imagine my astonishment when, in checking out the extras available in the newly released fourth-season set of The Rockford Files, I saw that it contains the Sleuth Channel’s “America’s Top Sleuths” special from last fall. Kevin Burton Smith, creator and editor of The Thrilling Detective Web Site, wrote about that special for The Rap Sheet (see his fine post here) and was even featured as one of the show’s expert interviewees. But as Kevin recounts in his own blog, this is hardly his only media exposure of late. It seems he was also interviewed last week by Shannon Clute and Richard Edwards for one of their “Out of the Past” film noir podcasts, this one concerning “alternative noir publications.” Kevin was one of three guests on the segment, the other two being Tee Morris, founder of Podiobooks, and Seth Harwood, author of the Podiobook Jack Wakes Up. Give them all a listen here.

• Sean Chercover, whose novel Big City, Bad Blood was chosen last week as one of The Rap Sheet’s most overlooked and underappreciated crime novels, is the subject today of John Kenyon’s “Monday Morning Interview” at Things I’d Rather Be Doing. Read Chercover’s comments here.

• Gerald So alerts us to the fact that, following a several-months hiatus, Megan Powell’s Shred of Evidence short-fiction e-zine is back in business, now as a blog. Hey, everybody’s doing it!

• Also back is Out of the Gutter, writer-editor Matthew Louis’ thrice-annual pulp-crime-fiction mag. Issue #2, containing work by William Boyle, John Rickards, Michael Bracken, and others, is now available for “pre-order.” Copies of the finished magazine are due to be sent out early next month. We’ve written about Out of the Gutter at least a couple of times before (see here and here); and while the first issue was a bit rough in spots, we’re pretty pumped to see how the publication will evolve.