• Today is Diamond Dagger Award-winning author Reginald Hill’s 72nd birthday, as Elizabeth Foxwell reminds us. Hill’s latest book, A Cure for All Diseases--which I believe is his 21st Dalziel and Pascoe novel--came out in the UK in March.
• Life, one of the few new shows from last fall’s American TV schedule that I found worth watching, will be back next fall on NBC. Unfortunately, reports TV Squad, it’s moving from its plum Wednesday at 10 p.m. spot to Fridays at the same hour. Contributor Richard Keller worries that “the move from Wednesdays to Fridays could mean the death of this show. Since it is a show that you need to sit and think about, there’s a chance that it won’t gain the increased fan base that it needs. Sure, it will probably still retain many of the fans it garnered from its pre-strike run, but how many of them will stay on when there is other original programming on during Friday nights that doesn’t involve as much synaptic activity?” Let’s hope that the new viewers discover the value of Life on Fridays.
• NoirCon opens today in Philadelphia. If, like me, you can’t make it to the City of Brotherly Love, at least you can tune in for the on-site podcasts promised by interviewers Shannon Clute and Richard Edwards. They’re supposed to make those podcasts available through their Noircast.net site, as well as “the official NoirCon blog page.”
• Publisher Hard Case Crime doesn’t want cover art by non-American illustrators? That’s not very open-minded, is it?
• Duncan Lawrie Dagger Award winner Ann Cleeves--whose second Shetland Quartet novel, White Nights, is just out in Britain--shares her reading list with Marshal Zeringue.
• John Kenyon reports in Things I’d Rather Be Doing on a conversation that members of the Rara-Avis crime fiction e-mail list had recently with author Michael Connelly, during which the creator of Los Angeles detective Harry Bosch confessed that “he was ready to give up on Bosch at least once (twice if you count the early arc that finished before his first stand-alone, The Poet. Phenomenal sales for that and subsequent books gave him the clout to pretty much write what he wanted, he said). That came in City of Bones, where Bosch walks out the door having quit the police force. [Said Connelly:] ‘It was around this time that I made some dramatic shifts in my personal life as well and lo and behold, it was Harry who was one of the only things constant in my life. So I clung to him, re-energized the creativity associated with him and continued to write about him. ... Any day I get to write about Harry Bosch remains a good day for me.’” And a good day for readers, too.
• Lonnie Cruse interviews author Elizabeth Zelvin, whose book Death Will Get You Sober was recently released. You can read their full exchange here.
• And will actor Jeremy Irons portray Sherlock Holmes in a future film adaptation of Laurie R. King’s 1994 novel, The Beekeeper’s Apprentice? That’s what King suggests in her blog, Mutterings.
Thursday, April 03, 2008
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6 comments:
Er, it's Liz Zelvin, actually, who wrote Death Will Get You Sober (though, indeed, it does seem as if a title like that should have an Irish name for the author). I just met her at the Public Library Association conference last week.
And then headed to the NEA/AFT Higher Education conference in DC and who do I meet there but Con Lehane. He fits right in among all those union types.
Whoops! Typo corrected now.
Cheers,
Jeff
Hi, Jeff --
Regarding Hard Case Crime and non-American illustrators, I just left a lengthy comment at Juri's site to try to clear up any misunderstanding. I suspect I might have bent over backwards a little too far to spare the artist's feelings when I wrote my rejection letter in this case; while it's true that we set a higher bar for non-U.S. artists because of the real hassles of dealing with international tax rules and shipping costs and delays, it is not the case that we'd never use a non-U.S. illustrator. We would -- but only one whose work we felt was on par with out very best. And in this case, alas, we didn't feel the samples the artist showed us were up to that very high standard. The fact that he was outside the U.S. made the decision easier, but we'd probably have reached the same decision if the artist had been in the U.S.
--Charles
Yes, I was probably a bit too eager to point out what had been told to me about Jukka's case. I just left a not-so-lengthy comment to Charles's comment.
But still I think someone should use Jukka's illos!
I would think a journalist like Kingston would source his information a little better before he made provocative comments like the one above.
Mr. Aradai's email address is on his website, so he would appear easy to reach for clarification or comment.
I don't usually bother responding to people who haven't the courage to sign their comments with their own names. But on this matter of Hard Case Crime and its illustrator-hiring practices, let me point out to Mr./Ms. "Anonymous" that I was simply referring briefly and in an offhand manner to a post that had appeared elsewhere, not stating anything on my own about those practices.
Cheers,
Jeff
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