Sweepings: Father’s Day Weekend Edition

• Kevin Burton Smith applauds the debut of a four-issue graphic novel series, Femme Noir: The Dark City Diaries, by Chris Mills. “Imagine Red Harvest meets The Dark Knight, starring the bastard love-child of radio’s The Shadow and [Will] Eisner’s The Spirit set loose in Gotham City, with a script cobbled together by Chester Gould, Dash Hammett, and Bob Kane on a three-day bender (possibly at [Mickey] Spillane’s house),” writes Smith. “And then imagine the Spirit as a dame with to-die-for-gams in a broad-brimmed hat, a trench coat, fishnets, and spike heels. Armed with twin automatics not afraid to sneeze ‘KA-CHOW!’” I haven’t bought Mills’ books, but I might have paid money just for that description.

• Travis McGee is going to the movies again? In Reference to Murder says that “director Gary Fleder (films Runaway Jury, Kiss the Girls and TV shows like Homicide, Blind Justice, The Evidence, and The Shield) is going to take on John MacDonald’s Travis McGee novel The Deep Blue Good-by.” (More on this project here.)

• The USA Network series Burn Notice has spawned a new series of tie-in novels being penned by Tod Goldberg, brother of Monk series author Lee Goldberg.

• We just got through Bristol’s CrimeFest, and the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival doesn’t begin for another month. Do we really need to be talking about yet another British crime-fiction convention?

• And why watch the whole 1982 pilot of William Shatner’s cheesy cop series, T.J. Hooker, when you can get the best-of-the-crap version in 50 seconds?