Puttering Around Potter

Yeah, I know: The only book news most people are paying attention to today revolves around the release of the latest Harry Potter novel. Nonetheless, there are some developments in the crime-fiction realm worth reporting. To wit:

• You’d better get your fill of recent Law & Order episodes, because NBC-TV has announced that if actor Fred Thompson--the former Nixon White House “mole” and ex-U.S. senator who plays District Attorney Arthur Branch on that long-running series--declares his candidacy for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination, as expected, it will yank reruns of L&O featuring Thompson, beginning on September 1 of this year. This could prove to be a major hassle for the network, as Thompson’s been on the show for the last half-decade. Read more here.

• Jon and Ruth Jordan, co-editors of Crimespree Magazine, are Julia Buckley’s latest victims ... I mean, interviewees at Mysterious Musings, where they talk about Bouchercon 2008, running a mag around their day jobs, and the future Crimespree Cookbook. Their entire exchange can be found here.

• While we’re on the subject of interviews, Jochem van der Steen’s latest subject over at his Sons of Spade blog is Andy Straka, author of the Frank Pavlicek P.I. novels (including Cold Quarry) and the forthcoming standalone Record of Wrongs (2008). You can find the results of their back-and-forth here.

• How many copies of a book must be sold before it’s a New York Times bestseller? More than you--or Tess Gerritsen--might expect, it seems. Read this.

• Mary Read’s research into older crime novels made available in their entirety on the Web--and now being catalogued at Read’s wonderful Maywrite Library site--has also led her to comment on some of these works at Mystery*File. Her latest discovery, it seems, is Adrian “Average” Jones, a “one-man consumer-protection wallah” who investigates “matters connected with Advertising.” Click here for a review of Samuel Hopkins Adams’ 1911 short-story collection, appropriately titled Average Jones.

• While we await Ali Karim’s report on this weekend’s Harrogate Crime Writing Festival, Ben Hunt of Material Witness offers his own early observations here.

• And how useful are those 12,000 book reviews Harriet Klausner has been posting at Amazon since 2000? Not very, according to Bloggasm’s Simon Owens.