Canvassing the Neighborhood

I usually leave Web link wrap-ups to other bloggers. However, there are a number of things happening lately on the crime-fiction front that deserve attention, but about which I simply can’t write at length. So, some quick hits:

• Book/Daddy’s Jerome Weeks has been commenting infrequently on what he considers to be the best spy fiction of 2006. His nominees so far: Restless, by William Boyd, and Forgetfulness, by Ward Just. Weeks also wrote an earlier post about how “the best espionage novels generally relate some variant of three different stories, the story of betrayal, brutalization or sacrifice.” Read that one here.

• That wonderful actor Sam Waterston, who for 13 years now has made his liberal opinions known in the role of Executive Assistant District Attorney Jack McCoy on the original Law & Order series, has signed on as “the ‘pitchman’ for Unity08,” according to Anthony Rainone’s Criminal Thoughts. Unity08 is “an effort to nominate a bipartisan, primary presidential ticket chosen solely by online voting.” Read more here.

• Steven Spielberg and Kathleen Kennedy have signed on to executive produce a six-hour small-screen adaptation of The Talisman, the 1983 novel by Stephen King and Peter Straub. TV Squader Adam Finley adds that the script for this mini-series, due to air on TNT in the summer of 2008, will be penned by Ehren Krueger (Arlington Road, The Ring, and The Brothers Grimm).

• Lee Goldberg’s Main Title Heaven reminds me of yet another TV series that deserves transfer to DVD format, The Name of the Game (1968-1971). Click here to see the opening, plus some of the very first episode of that show, which starred Tony Franciosa and Susan Saint James. By the way, the theme song from The Name of the Game was composed by jazz pianist Dave Grusin, who also gave us the themes from Dan August, Baretta, and It Takes a Thief.

• Hey, I didn’t know that Disney was making horror flicks.

• Can we really determine a person’s level of self-esteem by what sort of crime novels they prefer? Maybe so, says an assistant professor of communication at Ohio State University. Sarah Weinman has the scoop at Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind.

• The British e-zine Shots has introduced another new column, this one from Michael Carlson, described as “Britain’s hardest-boiled American critic,” who every month will offer “a distinctive look at the detective genre, with an eye toward those aspects of it which reflect its development (and his!) on the other side of the pond.” Carlson’s takes his first crack at Loren D. Estleman’s esteemed Amos Walker series.

• The Guardian’s Patrick Ness says that, yes, we should be judging books by their covers--and that many recent hardbacks (especially those published in the UK), with their “drab, unremarkable, and sometimes downright hideous” fronts, don’t meet book lovers’ standards of excellence. Personally, I prefer many British works of crime fiction, which tend to have moodier jackets. However, I agree that--with such notable exceptions as Hard Case Crime--modern publishers just aren’t asking enough of their designers, who seem quite content to turn out boring and often repetitious book jackets. Read Ness’ full commentary here.

• Is Casino Royale star Daniel Craig serious? He tells Movie News that he’s been “pressurizing [sic] producers to include a gay scene in the next James Bond film.”

• Over at the Crime Scraps blog, Uriah Robinson recounts how the criminal history of Massimo Carlotto (The Colombian Mule, The Master of Knots) has informed that Italian author’s fiction.

• On the occasion of his fourth novel, A Case of Two Cities, being published, Newsweek interviews Chinese crime writer Qiu Xiaolong.

• Issue #2 of B.J. Bourg’s e-zine, Mouthful of Bullets, is up. It includes short stories by Nick Andreychuk (“Bleeding Heart”), Dorothy Francis (“A Widow’s Plight”), and Kate Thornton (“The Eyes Never Change”), as well as poetry, flash fiction, book reviews, and an interview with Frank Zafiro (Under a Raging Moon).

• The new Jeff Goldblum crime drama, Raines, finally has a time slot: Fridays at 9 p.m. on NBC-TV (displacing the tedious Las Vegas). It will debut in March.

• From Mystery News: “The Mystery Writers of America has announced that the recipients of the 2007 Raven Awards for outstanding achievement in the mystery field outside the realm of creative writing are Kathy Harig, owner of Mystery Loves Company (Baltimore, MD, and Oxford, MD), and Mitchell Kaplan, owner of Books & Books (various locations in FL) and co-founder of Miami Book Fair International.”

• And last but not least, here are two new interviews worth reading: The first, with Anna Blundy (The Bad News Bible, Faith Without Doubt), comes from Shots; the second, with M.J. Rose (The Venus Fix, The Halo Effect), is posted at Murder & Mystery Books 101.