A Full Plate: Blondes, Barrys, and Brewer

• “I didn’t have any specific actors in mind when writing The Blonde--in fact, I think that’s a recipe for disaster,” says Philadelphia novelist Duane Swierczynski in his contribution to My Book, the Movie. “Instead of allowing your character to develop his/her own voice and personality, you risk having them all sound like Samuel L. Jackson. Because that’s who I could cast in every single role of every single novel or story I’ve written: Samuel L. Jackson.” As good as Jackson is, though, I can’t imagine him portraying poison victim Jack Eisley in The Blonde--and neither, it seems, can Swierczynski, who suggests John Cusack, instead. An ideal pairing, I think, with Aussie actress Melissa George, who would play the blonde of the title. Read more of Swierczynski’s casting thoughts here.

• Speaking of our friend Duane, he’s posted the second of three installments of a “short noir story,” “Sidewalk Tiger” in the alternative weekly he edits, Philly’s City Paper. You’ll find Part 2 here. To catch up by reading Part 1, click here.

• The Revenge of the Genre-Zombie? It positively cried out to become a real book.

• Deadly Pleasures editor George Easter offers a number of thoughts on this year’s Barry Award nominations (announced yesterday), including this one:

There are a handful of authors such as Lee Child and Michael Connelly who are so popular that if we listed one of their books as a nominee, they would win. They have each won two Barrys already and have asked not to be considered in the future so that others can be spotlit. We also try not to nominate the same authors in consecutive years, but we slipped up a bit on that front this year with Joe Finder and Simon Kernick. And speaking of Simon Kernick--I’ve got to go back a few years to see how many times he has been nominated without winning, but I would guess four or five times--I hope you are taking note of this exceptional writer and reading his books. I’d like to see him win one of these days. But he’s up against some tough competition again this year.

By the way, we forgot to note that the Barry Awards are named in honor of longtime “friend of mystery fiction” Barry Gardner.

• Obviously, I have been missing something by not reading Jean-Claude Izzo’s Marseilles Trilogy. I’ll have to rectify that failure.

• Still awaiting Ali Karim’s report from the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival, we make do with a couple of dispatches from Guardian blogger Chris Wiegand (see here and here).

• For its once-a-month focus on Canadian writers, Poe’s Deadly Daughters interviews Giles Blunt of Toronto, author of the Dagger Award-nominated The Fields of Grief (otherwise known as By the Time You Read This). Topics range from the musical tastes of fictional characters to the penning of screenplays and the importance of awards (“It’s very pleasant to win awards or to be nominated, but you can’t take them seriously”). You’ll find the full exchange here.

• Steve Brewer, author of Monkey Man and the forthcoming Cutthroat, writes to say that he’s created a new blog--sort of.

For the past nine years, I’ve written a weekly humor column that appears in newspapers around the country. The Home Front, a column about working at home and the all-around absurdity of family life, often draws comparisons to Dave Barry and Erma Bombeck. You can read the current column anytime by going to my website--www.stevebrewerbooks.com--and clicking on the link to the Albuquerque Tribune.

The columns get archived by the Trib, and many appeared in my 2003 book Trophy Husband, but there’s been no place where you can read all 450-plus columns for free. Until now. My wife helped me set up a blog--www.stevebrewer.blogspot.com--where we’ve put the first half-dozen columns from The Home Front’s long run. The plan is to add a couple more every few days until, eventually, they’re all on the blog.

• Finally, don’t forget to vote for who you think is “the best TV/movie criminal attorney in history,” the subject of The Rap Sheet’s latest reader poll. So far, Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck) from the 1962 film To Kill a Mockingbird is ahead in the voting, with Perry Mason (Raymond Burr) and Horace Rumpole (Leo McKern) occupying the second and third spots. But much can change over the next couple of weeks, as we leave this poll in place. If you haven’t already voted, please do so in the silver-shaded box at the top of this page’s right-hand column. We’ll announce the winner around the end of July.