Hitting All the Bases

• Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, one of the books I have most looked forward to reading this season, and which is due in bookstores this week, receives a mixed review from C. Max Magee of The Millions. While he applauds Chabon’s alternative history conceit (that “the world’s Jewish population was offered a temporary homeland in Alaska following World War II”), he is disappointed that the author uses that premise “as little more than backdrop for a detective story of fairly straightforward construction.” Regardless, I shall be among the first to procure a copy of this novel, and have already convinced the members of my monthly book group to read it. You’ve got to figure that any author who takes an extra year to rewrite a book so that it will meet his expectations is either obsessive, or a craftsman of uncommon merit. Chabon belongs in the latter category, as is made clear in more complimentary review of the novel in the Los Angeles Times. I look forward to the exchange of opinions on Yiddish.

• Regis Behe of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review interviews Chabon here.

• What’s an Edgar Award-winning short story like? You can judge for yourself, as Hard Case Crime has now made available online “Home Front,” the yarn for which company honcho Charles Ardai took home top honors this last Thursday. In other HCC news, an e-note received this morning reports that the publisher “just reached an agreement with the brilliant Donald E. Westlake to bring back into print an outstanding book of his that hasn’t been available in more than 35 years. It’s the story of a New York City cab driver who has a hell of a time collecting on a winning horse race bet, and it’s called Somebody Owes Me Money.” The book is due out in 2008.

• Bookgasm introduces us to a new line of pulp magazine reprints, including the long-forgotten but eternally provocative title Spicy Mystery. It seems this and many other pricy reprints are coming from an Ontario, Canada, company called Girasol Collectables. The enterprise produces three new magazine replicas each month.

• Crimespree Cinema’s Jeremy Lynch has the lowdown on casting for the film adaptation of James Lee Burke’s 1993 novel, In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead. We already knew that Tommy Lee Jones is set to play Louisiana detective Dave Robicheaux (a truly inspired choice), but Lynch notes that Ned Beatty, John Goodman, Kelly MacDonald, and Tom Sizemore have also signed on. It’s only unfortunate that producers of this film (which is due in theaters in December of this year) have apparently chosen to shorten the evocative title of Burke’s book, making it simply In the Electric Mist.

• The new, April/May 2007 issue of Mystery News reached my mailbox yesterday. It carries a front-page interview with the amazingly prolific UK novelist Edward Marston, whose fourth Inspector Robert Colbeck book, The Iron Horse, is due out in Britain in July; and who tells MN that he’s “currently working on a military adventure that has strong elements of crime but is not really a mystery.” Elsewhere in the paper, Rap Sheet contributor Stephen Miller interviews Sean Chercover (Big City, Bad Blood), and Marv Lachman recaps the career of Brett Halliday (aka Davis Dresser), best known as the creator of Miami private eye Mike Shayne.

• Meanwhile, the May edition of Crime and Suspense has been posted, with new fiction by Jan Christensen (“The Antidote”), Edward McKinney (“Tailless”), and others, plus the premiere installment of Donna Nowak’s three-part “neo-Golden-Age” serial, “Saved by Miss Bell.” There’s also notice here about a brand-new anthology of Crime and Suspense tales from Wolfmont Publishing. Oh, and let’s not forget about the second full edition of Blazing! Adventures Magazine, which features stories by Patrick Lambe (“The Whore of Lemuria”), Ron Capshaw (“Murder on the Train of History”), and Dwight Geddes (“Consequential Damage”), as well as “Gunmen,” part four of Xavier Treadwell’s modern pulp serial. (Previous installments of that serial can be found here.)

• Author-critic Mike Ripley’s latest column in Shots heaps kudos on Sarah Dunant (creator of private eye Hannah Wolfe) and Jenny Siler (who, under the pseudonym “Alex Carr,” has a new Europe-based thriller due out this month, An Accidental American); reveals that the late actor Ian Richardson was once in the running to play Inspector Endeavour Morse on British TV; laments clunky translations of Scandinavian crime fiction; and alerts us to a coming novel from “Red Riding Quartet” author David Peace, Tokyo Year Zero, due out this coming September.

• U.S. television executives being as capricious and fearful as they are, there’s no telling yet whether the Jeff Goldblum mid-season replacement series, Raines, will be green-lighted for a full season in the fall. But for now, at least, you can visit the NBC-TV Web site and watch all seven existing episodes. I think the show is pretty good ... but of course, that’s relative to all the other crap that’s now taking up American TV time.

• Oscar Wilde, detective? It isn’t a new idea; Walter Satterthwait’s 1991 novel, Wilde West, imagined the flamboyant Irish playwright and author pursuing a murderer of prostitutes in 19th-century America. But now British author-politician-raconteur Gyles Brandreth intends to enhance Wilde’s creds as a sleuth in a series of nine novels, the first of which is Oscar Wilde and the Candlelight Murders, just out from UK publisher John Murray. He explained his longstanding interest in Wilde, and his intentions with this new series, in an interview in yesterday’s edition of The Scotsman. Read it here. (Hat tip to Euro Crime.)

• Some people wouldn’t like to be reminded all the time of just how much they don’t know about a subject in which they fancy themselves a qualified expert. I, on the other hand, appreciate being told new things about crime fiction--particularly on the subject of works written long before I was even born. Which is why I often find myself clicking over to Steve Lewis’ Mystery*File blog (which includes a voluminous archive of material from the previous Mystery*File magazine). Just yesterday, for instance, I discovered this retrospective on the early 20th-century detective fiction of Herbert Jenkins (1876-1923), the creator of British intelligence agent-turned-sleuth Malcolm Sage. Despite a write-up about Sage at The Thrilling Detective Web Site, I’d never heard of the character before. Yet, judging exclusively from Mary Read’s assessment of the short-story collection Malcolm Sage, Detective (1920), he sounds like somebody whose adventures are worth watching out for as one cruises garage-sale book boxes and used-book stores.

• Not only does last year’s Casino Royale appear to have reinvigorated the flagging James Bond movie franchise, but it also seems to have unleashed upon the world newfound authorial interest in Ian Fleming’s Agent 007. First came Simon Winder’s book, The Man Who Saved Britain. Now look out for The Battle for Bond: The Genesis of Cinema’s Greatest Hero, by Robert Sellers. In hopes of whetting the reading public’s appetite, the UK’s 007 Magazine has posted an exclusive extract from Sellers’ work here. (Hat tip to Shotsmag Confidential.)

• And Libby Fischer Hellmann is the latest crime novelist to suggest appropriate casting for one of her books (in this case, 2005’s A Shot to Die For) at My Book, the Movie. So, who does she think would be best in the role of protagonist Ellie Foreman, the Chicago video producer? The ever-watchable Marisa Tomei (My Cousin Vinny).