Scattershot Sunday

• As part of Penguin UK’s “We Tell Stories” project, British journalists-novelists Nicci Gerrard and Sean French--who write together under the pseudonym “Nicci French”--will put together an original piece of fiction online this week. Blogging in St. Martin’s Minotaur’s Moments in Crime, the pair explain that “It’s a story called ‘Your Place and Mine’ and we will start it tomorrow, Monday 6 April, between 6:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. (British time) and continue at the same time every day until we finish it on Friday--if we don’t collapse first. You can find out about it here.”

• Although most of us can’t be at NoirCon in Philadelphia this week, Peter Rozovsky of Detectives Without Borders is among those attending. And he’s blogging from the event. See his reports here. UPDATE: Also blogging about NoirCon is Mike White at Impossible Funky. His daily posts are collected here.

• When asked by The Scotsman, “What one thing would improve your life?,” Sara Paretsky answered, “To see Dick Cheney’s head on a spike over Tower Hill. It would cheer me up, if it didn’t change my world. Or maybe, as a U.S. citizen, it would improve things if women were given full equality and the full protection of the law.” Read the complete interview here.

• The March issue of Mouth Full of Bullets has been released, with some of its contents available on the Web. Look here for new short stories by Earl Staggs (“Battered”), Herschel Cozine (“Shakey’s Debt”), and Sylvia Nickels (“The Perfect Wife”), as well as flash fiction, poetry, reviews, and the final installment of S.F. Johnston’s serial, “Mr. Sparks.”

• In today’s Los Angeles Times, Scott Timberg ponders the difficulty of making films from James Ellroy’s novels.

• I wasn’t much of a Charlton Heston fan, and found his right-wing politics and ardent promotion of gun ownership rather offensive. (And weird, since Heston had started out as a Democrat and supported President Lyndon Johnson’s Gun Control Act of 1968.) But upon hearing today that Heston died last night at age 84, I couldn’t help remembering that he marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in support of civil rights and made two science-fiction films that I’ll never regret seeing: Planet of the Apes (1968) and Soylent Green (1973). National Public Radio’s Gloria Hillard recalled Heston’s long and complicated life, as well as his movie masterpieces, on this morning’s Weekend Edition Sunday. Listen to her report here.