Four of a Kind

• Two weeks after novelist Duane Swierczynski (Severence Package, The Blonde) delivered the first installment of a “short noir story” called “Sidewalk Tiger” in Philadelphia’s alternative weekly, the City Paper, he brings us the tense conclusion. To recap, Part 1 can be found here, Part 2 is here, and for the final section, click here.

• Former Royal Air Force pilot turned London Times arts correspondent and novelist Peter Cooper, better known to the crime-fiction-reading community under his pseudonym, Colin Curzon (The Body in the Barrage Balloon [1942], The Case of the Eighteenth Ostrich [1940]), has died at age 88.

• Mitch Silver, who’s the creative director of an advertising agency in New York state as well as the author of In Secret Service, a debut spy novel featuring Ian Fleming, creator of the legendary James Bond, submits that new book to Marshal Zeringue’s Page 69 Test.

• And GalleyCat reports that Georgia writer Karin Slaughter (Beyond Reach) is teaming up with “comics publisher Oni Press to launch Slaughterhouse Graphic Novels, a new line of original comic books and graphic novels [that] will be devoted exclusively to creations written by established writers from the world of prose fiction.” Read the whole story here.