Three’s a Crowd Pleaser

• British writer John Rickards (who still owes us an already much-ballyhooed new print and online crime-fiction magazine, Degeneration Twenty) is interviewed by Sons of Spade blogger Jochem van der Steen. Our favorite response comes in answer to a question about how he promotes his novels: “I carve their titles into my forehead and run screaming through the centre of town. That, or pay performing midgets to spell them out from the rooftops in semaphore. (Lies upon lies. I only *wish* I could do that.)” The entire interview can be found here.

• Speaking of interviews (and it seems we do a heck of a lot of that around here), Cornelia Read is the featured author in the March edition of New Mystery Reader Magazine. She answers queries about her status as a “reformed debutante,” her choice to write tales set in the 1980s, and her treatment of troubled young people in her latest novel, The Crazy School. That whole exchange is available here.

• Finally, since we’re always interested in the subject of crime-fiction book cover design, we were intrigued by photographer-artist Henry Sene Yee’s explanation of how he came up with the jacket for the paperback edition of Volk’s Game, by Brent Ghelfi. He gives the inside story here. It’s a splendid book front, by the way, even if it is another of those ubiquitous split covers.