All Over the Map

• Do you mean to tell me that I may never have seen the actual ending to the 1955 movie adaptation of Mickey Spillane’s novel Kiss Me Deadly? And you might never have, either. “MGM certainly was unaware that their vaulted negative and all official prints were incorrect and that it had been distributing a mutilated version to revival houses and television stations for forty years,” writes Glenn Erickson at the wonderful Noir of the Week film site. “Not even experts Martin Scorsese and Bertrand Tavernier knew that they’d been watching an altered ending. Scorsese had just included Kiss Me Deadly in a compilation documentary about subversive films in the 1950s, with the incorrect conclusion.” Read Reynolds’ report here.

• It’s Embarrassment of Riches Day over at Marshall Zeringue’s Page 69 and Page 99 test pages. First off, he’s got the one and only James Lee Burke submitting his new novel, The Tin Roof Blowdown, to the Marshall McLuhan-inspired Page 69 Test. (See the outcome here.) Meanwhile, Florida novelist Bob Morris puts his wonderfully titled latest novel, Bermuda Schwartz, through both the Page 69 Test and Zeringue’s other Page 99 Test (with the results available here).

• With three days left before the much-anticipated roll-out of the seventh and (supposedly) last of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, The Scotsman asks half a dozen Scottish writers to suggest how they think the novel might end. Included among those six are Allan Guthrie (Hard Man). Read their resolutions here. And crime-fiction blogger Ben Hunt tells in Material Witness why he’s become a Potter follower.

• Partway through an interview in Pulp Pusher, Irvine Welsh (Trainspotting, The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs) says that “I’m not a big fan of police procedural stuff, I like the more edgy, existential arty stuff.” Yet barely a breath later, he reveals that “My next novel isn’t really a crime novel, but the protagonist is an Edinburgh cop on holiday in Florida.” Oddly, the interviewer chooses not to follow up on that answer. We’ll just have to wait and see where Welsh goes with that story premise. You’ll find the interview here. (By the way, I really wish Pulp Pusher would make it easier to send people over to its specific pages, rather than making them go through the publication’s main page every time. Perhaps some brilliant computerphile out there can tell me how to discern the URLs of specific pages within this site.)

• Reviewer-blogger David J. Montgomery has come back from this last weekend’s ThrillerFest with publishing-industry wisdom he’s willing to share. While many reasons for the success or failure of a new novel are obviously beyond the author’s influence, he notes that the biggest one isn’t: “The best way to get your book reviewed, and the best way to have it be a success, is to write the best book you possibly can. And that is the one area of the process over which an author actually has control.

• Just when we thought the Crime and Suspense Webzine was a goner, editor Tony Burton announces a strategy to keep it going. Beginning in November of this year, C&S will adopt a bimonthly schedule (rather than publishing every month) but will be available only to paid subscribers, though an archive of issues up until that point will remain open to the public at large. Between now and December 31, subscriptions will be $10 a year; after that, the rate climbs to $12. More details can be found here.

• What are writers reading this summer? Time magazine asked 16 noteworthy wordsmiths to reveal their recent “guilty pleasures” from the bookshelves. Among the responses: Alexander McCall Smith is apparently spending time with his nose in Dick Francis’ horse-racing mysteries; Nathan Englander (The Ministry of Special Cases) has been indulging in the late Batya Gur’s Literary Murder; Janet Evanovich has reserved time for Dark Horse’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 8 comic books; and David Baldacci’s to-be-read pile is topped by Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series.

• Bruce Grossman’s new “Bullets, Broads, Blackmail & Bombs” column in Bookgasm positively reeks of testosterone. He tackles books featuring three detectives who are evidently new to this column: Travis McGee (in A Purple Place for Dying); Lew Archer (in Black Money); and the considerably less well-known Sam Hunter (from Sleaze). Read Grossman’s comments here.

• John Freeman, president of the U.S. National Book Critics Circle, wonders in Britain’s Guardian newspaper why the corruption exhibited by the Bush administration hasn’t yet engendered any great works of fiction. How is it, he opines, that novelists have left it to people such as Keith Olbermann, the anchor at MSNBC-TV’s Countdown, to take the present prez to task for his actions? Certainly, this could be a fertile are for crime fictionists to tackle. Who’ll volunteer first? Read Freeman’s comments here.

• Good news for John Connolly: “Irish director John Moore (Behind Enemy Lines, The Flight of the Phoenix) has optioned the rights to last year’s The Book of Lost Things,” reports novelist-blogger Declan Burke. “It’s an unusual move for Connolly, who has been excessively cautious to date about allowing movie-types to get their grubby mitts on his material, particularly the Charlie Parker novels. The Book of Lost Things being a standalone, maybe Connolly figures that even if it’s a total mess it can’t do too much damage ...”

• Finally, Rap Sheet contributor Anthony Rainone looks forward to this coming weekend’s Harlem Book Fair, during which Walter Mosley will be among the award recipients. Read more here.