Follow the Evidence

• Blogger John Kenyon nabs Steve Hamilton as his latest interviewee at Things I’d Rather Be Doing, quizzing the upstate New York author on his employment of place as character, his difficulty in writing short stories, his job at IBM, and Hamilton’s forthcoming standalone novel, The Last Guardian (due out later this year). Read the interview here.

• Mark Billingham is out, and Natasha Cooper is in as the chair of Great Britain’s annual Harrogate Crime Writing Festival. Euro Crime has the scoop.

• The latest issue of Blood ’n’ Thunder magazine, the more-or-less-quarterly helmed by Ed Hulse, is now available, with its focus on “the detective pulp magazines, and perhaps most on the best of them all, Black Mask,” as Mystery*File’s Steve Lewis reports.

• And Michael Hayes, the pretty-much-forgotten, 1997-1998 CBS-TV drama in which former NYPD Blue dog David Caruso starred as an earnest U.S. Attorney in New York City, is among seven series Sony Pictures is considering releasing soon on DVD. But the execs at Sony apparently want to know what you think. (What is this, a democracy or something?) So they’ve launched a poll site where you can vote for the show you’d be most likely to purchase. Not that most of the choices are great. Along with Michael Hayes (which I thought was good, but a bit one-note in its time), Sony has nominated The Rookies, Cupid, Police Story, The $treet, Bette!, and What’s Happening Now! I’ll definitely be voting for Police Story (1973-1977), an award-winning anthology series about Los Angeles cops, cooked up by policeman-turned-novelist Joseph Wambaugh. If What’s Happening Now!, the insipid sequel to the Carter-era sitcom What’s Happening!!, wins this Sony survey, it will only be more proof that the apocalypse is close at hand. Let your own voice be heard here.