Once Around the Block

After a few days away from the crowded Rap Sheet desk, while I attended the Left Coast Crime convention in Seattle and then finished some other, non-blogging work, I am trying to catch up on newsworthy items. Here are a few worth noting:

• The Sunday New York Times Magazine recently ended its serialized run of Michael Connelly’s Harry Bosch novella, The Overlook. That followed the publication in installments of Elmore Leonard’s Comfort to the Enemy. Now comes The Independent with news that Scotsman Ian Rankin will soon be “the first non-American author to have a specially commissioned work serialised by The New York Times.” Rankin’s yarn will debut in May and run every Sunday for 14 weeks. What’s the downside? Rankin’s fictional Edinburgh police detective, John Rebus, won’t star in this serial. The Independent explains that “The plot, apparently, will revolve around an audacious art heist.” Rankin adds: “It will have a thriller element but will be lighter in tone. When I think what people want to read on a Sunday morning, they don’t want anything too heavy. It will be a chance to write something lighter about Edinburgh.”

• Speaking of Elmore Leonard ... In December he received the annual Raymond Chandler Award during Italy’s Courmayeur Noir in Festival. Fellow novelist James W. Hall (Forests of the Night) captured at least part of the presentation on video, which is now available for viewing at Leonard’s Web site. Click here to watch.

• Former Time magazine bureau chief Matt Beynon Rees, who had dreamed of becoming a novelist ever since he was 7 years old, talks with the Middle East Times about his debut crime novel, The Collaborator of Bethlehem (Soho Crime). The British-born Rees recalls that after writing a non-fiction book, Cain’s Field: Faith, Fratricide, and Fear in the Middle East (2004), “I started to see journalism was an inadequate way to put across all I knew about the Palestinians ... Listening to people’s stories--and Palestinians have such a candid way of expressing themselves--I knew there was so much more to say than I could ever get into Time magazine.” In Collaborator, not-so-brave Palestinian schoolteacher Omar Yussef sets out to prove that a former student of his didn’t conspire in the assassination of a Palestinian guerilla.

• Oh, no. Say it ain’t so. USA Today reports that Ian Fleming’s beloved Jamaican estate, Goldeneye (which eventually lent its name to a 1995 James Bond film), will “become a tourist trap.” The newspaper explains that

Work begins in June on 82 villas, cottages and suites at the 100-acre property overlooking a harbor in St. Mary parish, Jason Henzell, president of luxury hotelier Island Outpost, said Monday.

Henzell said Goldeneye’s current owner, media mogul Chris Blackwell--who is also the owner of Island Outpost--wants to use the property for tourism.

“He wants to develop a new niche in Jamaica called residential tourism, where people buy land, visit and ultimately promote the island,” he said Monday. He declined to comment on the project’s cost.

USA Today adds that articles of Fleming memorabilia are kept at Goldeneye, and that several 007 movies, including Dr. No (1962) and Live and Let Die (1973) were shot near the estate.

• In The New York Times, film critic Janet Maslin delivers a fond appreciation of author Sidney Sheldon, who died last week at age 89. “He was both literate and lurid, and he made that combination hard to resist,” Maslin remarks. “He achieved his effects by using a secret weapon: his nostalgic appreciation of Thomas Wolfe, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and their storytelling skills. Thus equipped, and endlessly interested in the rich, powerful and tragic, he brought class to trash. And he did it with consistent professionalism, turning himself into a legitimate brand name. If that sounds like no great accomplishment, think about how rarely an author does it right.”

• Christa Faust, whose pulp novel Money Shot will make her the first woman to be published by the popular press Hard Case Crime, talks with Lance Carter of the Murder & Mystery Books 101 blog about her history of writing in the horror genre, her novelizations of movies, and her “fetish for noir cinema.” Read their exchange here.

• The Mystery Morgue site features a new interview with blogger extraordinaire (and sometime January Magazine contributor) Sarah Weinman, in which she reveals how baseball turned her on to crime fiction and talks about her desire to “write Jewish,” how she chooses books to review, and what it takes to become a “cabaña boy.” Also at Morgue: David Corbett (The Devil’s Redhead, Blood of Paradise) tells how his novels take shape. Both pieces can be found here.

• And I was sorry to hear about the death of Tige Andrews, the actor who played Captain Adam Greer, the cop responsible for recruiting the offbeat young investigators in television’s The Mod Squad. Andrews was 86 years old. (Via Mystery*File.)