Sweepings: Belize, BEA, and Blunt Edition

• Barry Award nominee and Rap Sheet contributor Megan Abbott guest-blogs at Murderati, relating the fact of her “split life”--being a grant writer during the week and novelist on weekends, when she gets to write “about 1950s Hollywood, or after-hours gambling clubs or b-girls in trouble.” That piece can be read here.

• Whatever other value guest blogging may have, it serves to introduce readers to authors they’ve never heard of before, but whose work they ought to try. Such an example is Belize-reared Ian Vasquez, who’s responsible for filling up the bytes this week at St. Martin’s Minotaur’s Moments in Crime blog. I just happened to receive a copy of his first novel, In the Heat, and had set it aside without any opinion on its future, when I came across his Moments in Crime contributions. Vasquez’s musings on writing style, voice, and backdrop have convinced me to add In the Heat to my TBR pile. The fact that its action takes place in Belize, where I once spent most of a week (with a side trip to Guatemala, in order to see the Mayan ruins at Tikal) is an added attraction. The plot concentrates around a locally beloved boxer, Miles Young, who agrees--in exchange for being given a place on a premium fight card--to look for a missing daughter who’s run off with the ex-chief of police’s son. Let’s hope for the best. I’m reading this one at the same time as I do Tom Rob Smith’s Child 44 and Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher: A Shocking Murder and the Undoing of a Great Victorian Detective. Tough competition.

• Martin Edwards (Waterloo Sunset) makes a pilgrimage to Agatha Christie’s grave, at Wallingford in south Oxfordshire.

• Jeri Westerson, author of the forthcoming “medieval noir” novel, Veil of Lies, is in Los Angeles this weekend, reporting from Book Expo America. “All I can say is: Oh my gawd! Books, books, and more books!,” she enthuses in her first post. “ Feeling a part of this crazy publishing thing for the first time, I wore a perpetual smile on my face as I beheld the amazing landscape of books and people intimately partnered with books.” Also blogging from BEA is Lee Goldberg (Mr. Monk in Outer Space).

• No matter how many times I look at this book, I keep reading the title as Careless in Bed. I’d almost be sorry to actually read the novel, because the premise I have already concocted around my alternative title seems so much more delightful.

• It seems there’s finally a release date--September 19--for Whiteout, the thriller (based on Greg Rucka’s 1998 graphic novel of the same name) that stars the ever-loved Kate Beckinsale as a U.S. marshal who must solve a murder in Antarctica.

• The Wall Street Journal interviews Southern Californian Don Winslow, author of this coming week’s new “surf noir” novel, The Dawn Patrol. A review of that book should appear soon in January Magazine. Meanwhile, the Journal interview with Winslow is here.

• Jane Jakeman of The Independent catches up with Cuban crime writer Leonardo Padura on the occasion of his book Havana Gold--the second novel in his Havana Quartet, but the fourth to be published in English--reaching bookstores.

• James Reasoner revisits The January Corpse, by Neil Albert, a novel about which Kevin Burton Smith wrote here two weeks ago as part of Patti Abbott’s “forgotten books series.”

• After watching the book trailers for Tony Black’s soon-to-be-published first novel, Paying for It, and Tara French’s Edgar Award-winning In the Woods, Declan Burke asks “whether book trailers are doing what it says on their celluloid tins. Yes, they’re all zeitgeisty and whatnot in terms of viral marketing, but does anyone really watch them?” More here.

• I finally caught up with the film Charlie Wilson’s War, about a fun-loving Democratic Congressman from Texas who, quite under the radar, manages to finance the largest covert military operation in U.S. history, targeting the Soviets in Afghanistan. Written by Aaron Sorkin of The West Wing fame, it’s a smart, fast-moving, fast-talking, and often funny picture that uses Tom Hanks and Philip Seymour Hoffman to best effect, and includes a languidly erotic scene that will never let you look at Emily Blunt again without going all gape-mouthed. Jeff Bob says check it out. By the way, the subject of that film turns 75 years old tomorrow.

• While we’re on the subject of films, Marty McKee looks back at one of my favorite James Garner movies, Skin Game (1971).

• And from the Brain Candy File: Factoring in inflation and the Republican recession, how much would it cost to build The Six Million Dollar Man today? Click here.