The Briefing

• The last week hasn’t been a good one for contributors to crime-fiction. First, novelist Arthur Lyons died. Then, just yesterday, actor Richard Widmark gave up the ghost at age 93. And now Jiro Kimura’s The Gumshoe Site (which has been particularly newsworthy of late) alerts us to the demise, on March 25, of American film writer and producer Abby Mann. As Kimura notes, Mann won an Oscar for penning Judgment at Nuremberg (in the 1961 film adaptation of which Richard Widmark did such an outstanding job as an obsessed prosecutor) and an Emmy Award for the screenplay of The Marcus-Nelson Murders, which served as the inspiration for the 1973-1978 CBS-TV series Kojak, starring Telly Savalas. Mann was also responsible for the screenplay of The Detective, a 1968 film (adapted from Roderick Thorp’s 1966 novel of the same name) in which Frank Sinatra played a police detective juggling marital issues and a murder investigation. Mann was 84 years old.

• Two recent offerings worth finding in Marshal Zeringue’s Campaign for the American Reader “network” of blogs: Irish playwright-author Declan Hughes submits his third and latest Ed Loy book, The Price of Blood (aka The Dying Breed) to the Page 99 Test. The results are available here. Meanwhile, Australian author Peter Corris, creator of the P.I. Cliff Hardy series (Appeal Denied), reveals the contents of his to-be-read pile, which include a novel about the infant colony of New South Wales and Stieg Larsson’s much-ballyhooed The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

• Designer Will Staehle’s evocative jacket for the American edition of Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union won The Rap Sheet’s first-ever Book Cover of the Year competition. But the front of the new British paperback edition of Chabon’s book definitely rivals it for intrigue and excellence.

• Could P.D. James’ dystopian 1992 novel, The Children of Men, and the terribly under-rated 2006 movie made from it spawn a TV series? Cinematical says “yes.”

• Margot Who?

• And while we haven’t been watching, Allan Guthrie has slipped a couple more excellent essays onto his Noir Zine page. In one, Harry J. Lerner considers Jonathan Gash’s 1985 novel, Pearlhanger, as a work of noir fiction. That essay is here. Editor Guthrie’s own new contribution is an interview with Tom Piccirilli, horror writer turned crime fictionist and author of the new book The Fever Kill.