Sweepings

• Is the first season of Burke’s Law, the 1963-1966 crime drama starring Gene Barry, really going to roll out on DVD in March? That’s what the Web site TV Shows on DVD reported in December. It even followed up with the package art for Burke’s Law--Season 1, Volume 1 and links to a couple of promotional videos (see here and here), both featuring a young and lovely Elizabeth Montgomery (later of Bewitched). But now the site fears this DVD set might not make its March 4 release date. Burke’s Law was a bit too early for me (I didn’t really start paying attention to crime fiction on television until 1972), but I did watch a few episodes from the series’ extra campy, 1994-1995 revival--enough that I’d be interested in seeing more of the original. Whenever it appears ...

• More DVD news: The first season of the Jill Hennessy forensics drama Crossing Jordan (2001-2007) is finally due out on May 6.

• I don’t think I noted this before, but the 2009 Left Coast Crime convention--“Say Aloha to Murder”--now has an active and filling Web site. That gathering on the Big Island, Hawaii, will feature Rhys Bowen and Barry Eisler as honorees, plus the entertaining Lee Goldberg as toastmaster. I hear that organizers are also set to revive the Bruce Alexander Historical Mystery Award, named for the late author of the Sir John Fielding mysteries and established in 2004.

• My colleague Linda Richards gets a nice write-up in the Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Star Phoenix on the occasion of the release of her new series start-up, Death Was the Other Woman.

• Sandra Seamans explores the “murky” process of submitting stories to Webzines, in an essay for Pulp Pusher.

• Max Allan Collins’ second novel written under the pseudonym “Patrick Culhane,” a World War II suspense novel set called Red Sky in Morning, has a release date: it’s August of this year.

• Finally, British author Michael Dobbs, most familiar for his novel House of Cards (which was made into a TV series starring Ian Richardson) has inked a six-figure, three-book deal with Simon & Schuster. The plan to develop Dobbs as an international thriller writer begins with a new novel, The Edge of Madness (due out in October), that details “a new type of conflict: cyber-warfare, where computers take over from missiles, and global damnation comes at the click of a button.” Hmm. It sounds a bit like that old Star Trek episode “A Taste of Armageddon.” I’m far less a fan of military thrillers than I am of political thrillers, but Dobbs is a good writer, so maybe he can make stories about cyber-warfare better than one-dimensional.