Checking the Traps

• The Summer 2007 edition of editor B.J. Bourg’s online crime-fiction mag, Mouth Full of Bullets, has finally been posted. Among the contents are short stories by Beth Groundwater (“Flamingo Fatality”), Jim Wilsky (“Always Had Been”), and Harrison Howe (“The Hat in the Cat”); flash fiction from Gerald So (“Ambition”) and Gay Toltl Kinman (“The Book Collector”); two installments of serials by S.F. Johnston; and poetry and book reviews. Plus, we find here Bourg’s “featured author” interview with Lisa Logan, who contributes both a short tale (“A Kink in the Tale”) and a column about networking with MySpace to this issue--which, as the editor points out, marks a completed first year of MFOB being published. Congratulations.

• We note the introduction of a new true-crime Web log, cleverly titled In Cold Blog. As Tangled Web, the British books site, explains, In Cold Blog is “the brainchild of best-selling true crime author Corey Mitchell. Mitchell, author of Hollywood Death Scenes, Dead and Buried, Murdered Innocents, Evil Eyes, and Strangler has gathered thirty-one of his true crime industry cohorts and professionals together to join him in this exciting new venture ... Tangled Web reviewer Carol Anne Davis is the British contingent, the other thirty professionals being based in the USA.” We’ve dutifully added In Cold Blog to The Rap Sheet’s extensive list of links (see the right-hand column on this page).

• Robert Gregory Browne’s novel, Kiss Her Goodbye, is the latest subject of Marshal Zeringue’s Page 69. Read Browne’s analysis here.

• It seems that the wonderful mystery-fiction reference book 1001 Midnights, by Bill Pronzini and Marcia Muller, published originally in 1986, is now back in print.

• Were you upset by Sunday’s concluding episode of The Sopranos? Well, just be glad, says veteran sitcom writer Ken Levine, that the show ended on cable TV, rather than network television. TV Squad provides the lead to this one.

• And I think I forgot to mention that Michael Connelly has posted a bonus Chapter 23 of his novella-turned-novel, The Overlook, at his Web site. Read it here--but, comes the official warning, only “AFTER you’ve finished reading the book.” Yeah, and how many of you peruse-the-last-chapter-first types are going to ignore that advice? Hah! I knew it!