Whitman’s Never Made Samplers This Good

• Only in the last few months have I heard of Mike Doogan, a former Anchorage newspaper columnist and current Democratic member of the Alaska House of Representatives. In April, his book, Lost Angel, won this year’s Best First Novel award from the Oregon-based Friends of Mystery, and then earlier this month, that same novel picked up a Shamus Award nomination from the Private Eye Writers of America. Anybody still wondering about his work should click over to Marshal Zeringue’s My Book, the Movie, where Doogan casts the part of cop-turned-private eye Nik Cane, “the battered, violent, uncertain hero” of both Lost Angel and its sequel, Capitol Offense, which is due out in August. Unfortunately, this author’s choice of an actor happens to be dead. Read more here.

• TV Squad has the early read on TNT’s three-part adaptation of Robert Littell’s acclaimed 2002 novel, The Company, which begins running this coming Sunday night. Read more here.

• The 23rd issue of Crime and Suspense has now been posted by editor Tony Burton. It contains stories by Warren Bull (“The Daily Double”), Agnes Dee (“Forever Gone Wrong”), and Gary R. Hoffman (“Luck of the Shot”), along with book reviews and an interview with Elmore Leonard, which was strangely inaccessible when I tried to look it up. (A note said that it has been removed. Let’s hope that this removal is only temporary.) In case readers have not been following the downs and ups of C&S’ future, Burton adds this note to his front page: “This is the final issue in the free-access format. Remember, we are on hiatus for September and October, resuming with the November/December issue for paying subscribers. And also remember that access to future issues of the Crime and Suspense e-zine will be only for paid subscribers.” Yeah, I think we’ve finally heard the message now.

• Add another cover to our roster of spooky tree fronts, this one from a book published in Australia. Only on this occasion, the tree is a palm. Click here, if you dare ...

• I love it when well-read authorities dig up worthy old crime novels that I’ve never so much as heard of, and Elizabeth Foxwell certainly does that with Re-enter Sir John (1932), a thespian sleuth adventure penned by Clemence Dane and Helen Simpson. This is apparently only the latest entry in Foxwell’s “occasional series” about books that were considered “essential” reads by Ellery Queen and Edgar Award-winning anthologist Howard Haycraft. For previous installments of the series, look here.

• The winner, in the “Detective” category, of this year’s Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest (for deliberately bad story openings) is Bob Millar of Hässelby, Sweden. His clever entry:

I’d been tailing this guy for over an hour while he tried every trick in the book to lose me: going down side streets, doubling back, suddenly veering into shop doorways, jumping out again, crossing the street, looking for somewhere to make the drop, and I was going to be there when he did it because his disguise as a postman didn’t have me fooled for a minute.

All of the 2007 victors and runners-up can be found here. (Via Dave’s Fiction Warehouse.)

• Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine columnist Jon L. Breen shares his thoughts about the “rules” of writing fiction in our modern age, at the blog Criminal Brief. Personally, I appreciate his third rule: “always go the second mile in doing research. How could I argue with this one, right? But I sold eight stories in a period of about three years to Ellery Queen’s [sic] Mystery Magazine about baseball umpire Ed Gorgon without ever actually meeting an umpire or going behind the scenes at a ballpark. After I wangled press credentials to Anaheim Stadium for one game and actually talked to some umps, I found I was unable to write another Ed Gorgon for about four years. (In fairness, when I finally did return to him, I used some of what I picked up that day at the ballpark.)”

• Peter Guttridge talks in The Guardian with Scottish wordsmith Denise Mina about her next Paddy Meehan novel--the third--called The Last Breath; how “[c]rime fiction now is big enough not to need tidy resolutions”; how Mina was “‘famously naughty’ and rebellious at [the] various convent schools” she attended as a teenager; and the oft-recurring themes of her work. “Mina laughs ruefully at mention of her themes,” Guttridge writes. “‘Every time I write a book I despair because I say to myself, “You’ve written the same fucking book again!’ Crime is a very hard genre to feminise. If you have a female protagonist she is going to be looking after her mum when she gets older; she is going to be worried about her brother and sister; she will be making a living while bringing up kids.’” Read the whole piece here. (Via Sarah Weinman.)

• Christa Faust, who will soon be the first woman novelist to join the Hard Case Crime stable, is among the winners of the “first annual” Scribe Awards, given out by the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers. Author-blogger Lee Goldberg has the whole list of winners at his Web site.

• Finally, Laura Lippman is this week’s interview subject at Things I’d Rather Be Doing. Blogger John Kenyon asks Lippman about her latest novel, What the Dead Know; the relative values of writing series vs. standalones; and her “calculated” candor on the Web. Their full exchange can be found here.