Wednesday, May 09, 2007

Sex and Stalin--Not Your Usual Combo

Can I first say how much I am digging Nathan Cain’s Wednesday picks of vintage “paperback porn” covers over at the Independent Crime blog? Click here to check see his selections so far.

Meanwhile, Chris Mooney, about whom we’ve written lately, submits his latest novel, The Missing, to Marshal Zeringue’s popular Page 69 Test. And at Zeringue’s My Book, the Movie blog, Kevin Wignall muses on how he might cast the roles in a Hollywood version of his first novel, People Die (2002).

While I’m in this rare mood to gush, let me also direct your attention to Clayton Moore’s latest “Mystery Strumpet” column, at the Bookslut site. “Somehow, this month, the Russians keep creeping up on me like a Cold War bureaucrat in a gray suit in a dark alley, wearing a sleek felt fedora,” Moore writes, introducing his assessment of several new books that use Russia--both its semi-democratic present and its previous, tsarist incarnation--as their backdrops. Included are Martin Cruz Smith’s forthcoming Stalin’s Ghost and The Gentle Axe, by The Rap Sheet’s own R.N. “Roger” Morris.

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