reasonably use there, so I wrote second piece with some of the less general, more specific things we discussed,” and he posted it in his own blog, Things I’d Rather Be Doing. You’ll find the first part here, and the follow-up here.• TV Squad’s selection of “The Top 10 Toughest Bald Guys on TV” is dominated by characters from crime fiction, including Richard Cross (Stanley Tucci) and Ted Hoffman (Daniel Benzali) from the original, 1996-1996 run of Murder One; Hawk, the smiling but deadly back-up muscle (played by the incomparable Avery Brooks) in Spenser: For Hire, who was later spun off into his own short-lived series, A Man Called Hawk; and of course, Lieutenant Theo Kojak--“Undoubtedly, the godfather of all bald tough guys,” as TV Squad’s Paul Goebel editorializes--the police detective whom Telly Savalas played in Kojak for five years, 1973-1978. One glaring omission: This list doesn’t include Michael Chiklis from The Shield, certainly one of the baddest baldies you’d ever want to meet in a dark alleyway ... or in line at your local Starbucks, for that matter. (UPDATE: “Top 10 Toughest Bald Guys on TV--Another View,” by Debra McDuffee, TV Squad.)
• The ubiquitous Sarah Weinman has begun a series in the online mag Barnes & Noble Review about historical mysteries. She commences with an overview of the numerous books set in ancient Egypt and Rome. Click here.
• To celebrate the April release of Hard Case Crime’s first back-to-back “double-format” novel, featuring a pair of Robert Bloch books--Spiderweb (1954) and Shooting Star (1958)--Bill Crider today posts a back-to-back comparison of the new and original book jackets (see here and here). Unfortunately, it’s not a unique idea: Nathan Cain already installed the older covers on his own blog, Independent Crime.
• Speaking of Bill Crider (Of All Sad Words) he’s grilled today by fellow novelist Steve Hockensmith (The Black Dove) as part of a new series in Marshal Zeringue’s Author Interviews blog. In the second part of this turnabout format, Crider will quiz Hockensmith. Part II is due for posting tomorrow.
• If you haven’t caught it before, Janet Rudolph’s Mystery Readers International site has been pairing up crime writers in the same way for a while now, the most recent match being between Steve Hamilton and William Kent Krueger. Their discussion can be found here. To catch up on MRI’s previous pairings, scroll down to the bottom of that page.
• It had to happen eventually: The 1987-1992 crime series Jake and the Fatman starring, respectively, Joe Penny and William Conrad, is being released in DVD format. Season 1, Part 1 is due in stores on
July 8. That’s the same date on which Conrad’s older private-eye series, Cannon (1971-1976), is set to go on sale. And now that I think about it, shouldn’t Frank Cannon have been listed among TV Squad’s toughest skintops, too?• Two new guest-blogging stints worth noting: Cara Black (Murder in the Rue de Paradis) goes scouting for murder locations in Paris for Murderati, while Reed Farrel Coleman (Empty Ever After) weighs the upsides and downsides of attending crime-fiction conventions in the First Offenders blog.
• Forty-six years after its original publication in Playboy, prolific TV scriptwriter Charles Beaumont’s nostalgic essay about the value of pulp fiction is available (in PDF format) on the Web. Click here to indulge yourself. (Hat tip to Pulp 2.0.)
• If you’ve been missing Australian actor Simon Baker since the cancellation of his legal drama series The Guardian back in 2004, you’ll be happy to hear that he might be returning to the small screen next fall in a CBS show called The Mentalist. It’s “the story of Patrick Jane,” reports TV Squad, “a man with heightened skills of observation who uses his talents to solve crimes.”
• South African writer Deon Meyer talks with The Wall Street Journal about social criticism in crime fiction, the alcoholic detective cliché, and his latest novel, Devil’s Peak. Read the results here.
• Scottish writer Allan Guthrie offers a video preview of his “dark ... brittle, but .... also very, very funny” new novel, Savage Night.
• It seems as if there are a lot of TV-related bits in today’s round-up of news items, but here’s another: At his blog, the oddly named Johnny LaRue’s Crane Shot, critic Marty McKee is busy reviewing individual episodes of James Garner’s 1974-1980 detective series The Rockford Files. As one who’s still making his way through the six years of Rockford episodes already available in DVD format, I welcome a few suggestions as to which eps I should watch first, and which can be viewed later.
• Nine whole months have passed since the Webzine Nefarious was last updated--long enough that I was ready to dump it from this page’s blogroll. But editor R.K. Foster has recently updated his ’zine’s look and is promising new content anon. Let’s hope so.
• Cosmos magazine considers the question, “Was Sherlock Holmes the original forensic scientist?” (Hat tip to In Reference to Murder.)
• And talk about delayed reaction! Eighty-five-year-old actor Jack Klugman is suing American TV network NBC over profits from his medical examiner mystery series, Quincy, M.E.--a quarter-century after that show ceased production. Quincy, you’ll recall, debuted in 1976 as part of the NBC Mystery Movie rotation, but was soon spun off as a separate series, remaining on the weekly schedule until 1983. People who remember Quincy fondly, or simply want to know more about it, are recommended to a rather ambitious online project called The Quincy Examiner.
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