Five for Friday

It’s too nice outside on this Friday evening in Seattle for me to be sitting behind a computer, composing lengthy posts about subjects of great gravity. I’d rather be out on my front porch, one hand wrapped around a gin-and-tonic, the other holding up George Pelecanos’ newest novel, The Night Gardener. So, I’ll just gather some tidbits of information and speculation into this single post.

• Fans of British novelist Andrew Taylor should be excited to hear that his Roth Trilogy of interlocking tales--The Four Last Things (1997), The Judgment of Strangers (1998), and The Office of the Dead (2000), all available in a hefty omnibus edition called Requiem for an Angel--is currently being made into a three-part dramatic series for the UK’s Independent Television (ITV) network. Although each of the televised installments will retain the title of its associated book, the ITV series as a whole will be called Fallen Angel. As Taylor reports on his blog:

The series will consist of three 90-minute films which will move backwards from present to past, mirroring the structure of the original novels. At present the plan is to show the films on consecutive nights, probably next spring.

The director is David Drury, and the cast includes Charles Dance, Emilia Fox, Clare Holman and many other stellar names. Sheila Hancock has a cameo role.

We’ve come close to television before, which is why I haven’t mentioned this earlier. On Monday, however, the enterprise reached the first day’s filming, generally considered to be the point of no return. Caroline and I went up to watch them filming on location, in that glamorous belt of country between London and Watford. We were made very welcome--and had the surreal Frankenstein experience of watching one’s very own monster acquiring independent life.

The official press release about the show can be found here.

No word yet on when, or whether, Fallen Angel will be made available to U.S. viewers. More than likely, we’ll have to wait longingly for a DVD release, instead.

• Five crime novelists are included among the nominees in the 2nd annual African-American Literary Awards Show’s Open Book Award competition. Vying in the Best Mystery category are:

Fortunate Son, by Walter Mosley (Little, Brown)
Fever in the Blood, by Robert Fleming (Kensington Publishing)
Voodoo Season, by Jewell Parker Rhodes (Atria)
Joplin’s Ghost, by Tananarive Due (Atria)
Ambition: Be Careful What You Ask For, by Johnathan Isom (M2N Publishing)

Nominations were made by book clubs from around the country and the AALAS advisory panel. Apparently, anyone can participate in the voting, which commences on Monday, August 7, at the AALAS Web site. Winners will be announced during an event at New York City’s Alhambra Ballroom on Wednesday, September 27. (Last year’s winner was When Death Comes Stealing, by Valerie Wilson Wesley.)

During that same presentation, Mosley will receive the Sojourner Truth Award for Excellence in American Literature. That commendation is given to “an African American who has advanced the standing of African Americans within American Literature.”

• Contrary to fears that editor/creator Kevin Burton Smith’s decision to put his estimable Thrilling Detective Web Site “on hiatus” in June would lead to its closing down altogether, it seems Kevin is back “in the saddle again, slowly (S-L-O-W-L-Y) putting together the next long-delayed issue of THRILLING DETECTIVE.” At least, that’s what he reported yesterday in his Thrilling Detective Blog. Equally exciting to learn: He’s been recruited as one of the “talking heads” for the Sleuth Channel’s forthcoming special, America’s Top Sleuths, which will report and elaborate on the results of an in-progress Web poll about TV and movie detectives. “Obviously,” Kevin quips, “they’ve never considered the ramifications of asking me to talk about a subject so near and dear to my heart. Or maybe they have. I saw no mention of an open bar.”

• Blogger and novelist Bill Crider (Mammoth Murder) has been doing a terrific thing lately: scanning and then posting the covers of classic paperbacks from his large collection onto the Flickr site. He started out by posting the sometimes racy, sometimes cheesy jackets of men’s action series books. But today he added 101 covers taken from novels by Travis McGee creator John D. MacDonald. As one who has recently become enamored of the “pulpish” artwork of Robert McGinnis, R.A. Maguire, and their brethren, Crider’s gallery of MacDonald art is a real find. I’m particuarly fond of the cover of The Drowner (1963), which manages to be sexy and terrifying at the same time. (Just click on the image to enlarge it.) But there are many more choice offerings here, as well. It makes me wonder just how big Crider’s library is these days.

• Finally, American television’s imminently obsolete network, The WB, is giving some new life to last fall’s Don Johnson short-run series, Just Legal. Well, more like making it one of the walking dead. Beginning this Sunday, August 6, at 7 p.m., the network will run the series pilot, to be followed on succeeding Sundays by the five never-shown installments of Just Legal. (The series was cancelled last October, after only three episodes had aired.) This Jerry Bruckheimer-produced serial about a pair of mismatched attorneys--Johnson playing a former hotshot attorney who’s lost his enthusiasm for the law, and Jay Baruchel as an 18-year-old legal prodigy held back by his youth--wasn’t the best thing on the small screen last fall. But the two principals had some chemistry, with Johnson (formerly of Miami Vice, of course) managing to keep his low-rent role from descending into the maudlin or ridiculous, or showing too much deference to his Doogie Howser-ish new partner. With little else to watch this summer, other than HBO’s Deadwood and news about the ever-worsening disaster in the Middle East, Just Legal isn’t bad entertainment for a Sunday night.