Pawing Through the Files

• With next to no fanfare, editor Damien Gay has posted the latest edition of The Outpost, his fine quarterly Webzine of Australian crime fiction. Among the “comic farces” and more serious yarns are works by Ken Cotterill (“Wrigley P.I. and the Height of Fashion”), Kate-Lyn Therkelsen (“The Other Woman”), and A.G. Bennett (“Postcard from Malaysia”). Eight stories in all. Worth your time.

• Irish novelist Brian McGilloway, whose debut novel, Borderlands, has been getting some good press in Europe, is put under the hot lights and drilled with questions by blogger-novelist Declan Burke. Well, maybe the questioning isn’t all that dramatic. Or even close to that dramatic. But McGilloway spills his guts here.

• Meanwhile, over at Things I’d Rather Be Doing, Chicago novelist Marcus Sakey (The Blade Itself) fields questions from John Kenyon about the relative merits of standalones versus series books, his research techniques, the important of self-promotion, and his second novel, At the City’s Edge, “which deals with a soldier returning from Iraq.” You can read their full exchange here.

• I don’t think the Webzine Pulp Pusher even got through one full cycle of its original quarterly publication, and already it’s ditching that schedule for a more frequent but piecemeal presentation. Newly added to the contents, from what I can tell, are stories by Sandra Ruttan (“Bull’s Eye”), ThugLit editor Todd “Big Daddy Thug” Robinson (“The Biggest Dick in Brooklyn”), and The Rap Sheet’s own Jim Winter (“For the Cause”). Get your fix here.

• Matthew R. Bradley delivers at CinemaRetro a delightful retrospective on the old Matt Helm movies, adapted (sort of) from the late Donald Hamilton’s novels. “When [John F. Kennedy] revealed his fondness for the James Bond books by Ian Fleming, and 007--ably embodied by Sean Connery--struck box-office gold with Dr. No (1962) and its sequels, the resultant ‘Bondmania’ set off a spy craze manifested in everything from atmospheric adaptations of Len Deighton and John le Carré to tongue-in-cheek secret agents on screens small and large,” Bradley recalls. “Perhaps the most successful of the latter was Matt Helm, a singing and swinging spy played in four films for Columbia Pictures by Rat Pack member Dean Martin …” His full essay can be found here. (Hat tip to Ed Gorman.)

• With a fourth John Rambo movie, starring none other than Sylvester Stallone, preparing to roll out sometime in 2008, Warner Bros. has apparently decided to take on another book by the American author who created Rambo (in 1972’s First Blood), David Morrell. Cinematical reports that Warners is developing an adaptation of Morrell’s 1984 novel, The Brotherhood of the Rose, “the story of … two orphans adopted by the CIA who are raised as perfect assassins and then are themselves hunted by the CIA.” Brotherhood was already made into a TV miniseries in 1989, but the plans this time are quite a bit grander. “The new project,” writes Cinematical’s Christopher Campbell, “seems to be a hopeful substitute for Universal’s similar Bourne movies once that franchise (likely) ends with this summer’s The Bourne Ultimatum. It may even try too hard and be an obvious copycat, but if Warners gets a decent duo to play the twins and a quality action director, it shouldn’t matter if we feel we’ve seen it all before. Action thrillers about spies who find out they’re being targeted are a very, very old concept, and they never really get tired.” Read more about this project here.

• Best-selling writer Thomas Perry submits his latest thriller, Silence, to Marshal Zeringue’s Page 69 Test. But, Perry notes, “understanding page 69 of Silence requires some background.” Read more here.

• “Who’s the cat that won’t cop out/When there’s danger all about?” Richard Roundtree, who played New York City detective John Shaft in the 1971 film Shaft, turns 65 today. Can you dig it?

• Los Angeles noir is the focus of Clayton Moore’s latest “Mystery Strumpet” column at the Bookslut site. Moore considers three books--Crystal Zevon’s I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon, Richard Lange’s Dead Boys, and Denise Hamilton’s anthology, Los Angeles Noir--and has the chance to talk with those last two authors about the Southern California city that is their muse and master.

• Finally, the Lists of Bests site has picked up The Rap Sheet’s recent rundown of “unjustly overlooked, criminally forgotten, or underappreciated” crime novels. The List of Bests format allows readers to conveniently keep track of which titles they have and have not read among our choices. Check it out here.