Bullet Points: Back from the Past Edition

In case you haven’t noticed, my participation on this page has been a bit lighter than normal over these last two months. Thank goodness for The Rap Sheet’s other contributors, especially Ali Karim, Linda L. Richards, and June’s guest blogger, Patrick Lennon (Steel Witches), who all took up the slack. Meanwhile, I was off finishing work on a photographic history of San Francisco, which should be out sometime before Christmas (I think). Thanks to that project, I’ve been pretty much living in the past since January, and especially since I began my final push toward the finish line in late May. I barely had time enough to lift my nose from the computer screen, much less read as prodigiously as I would like, or keep up with current affairs. (Had the media not repeated its coverage of escalating gas prices, as well as John “100 Years War” McCain’s floundering campaign and bewildering inconsistencies, I might have been in the dark about all of that until now.) Fortunately, I have moved into the proofing stage on this book and haven’t yet begun composing its companion volume about Seattle. So I have time in between to catch up with friends, housework, and blogging.

A few crime-related things worth noting recently:

• The new Mystery Scene magazine just dropped through my mail slot. It offers plenty of distractions, including Kevin Burton Smith’s interview with 70-year-old writer Lawrence Block (Hit and Run); Jon L. Breen’s retrospective on the work of novelist (not politician) Thomas B. Dewey, who came up with one of the all-time best titles for a private eye novel, The Girl with the Sweet Plump Knees (1963); a catching-up piece on John R. Maxim (Bannerman’s Ghosts); and Ron Miller’s review of two UK series making their way back to America’s PBS-TV this month: Inspector Lewis and Foyle’s War. Oh, and elsewhere in the issue, novelist James O. Born interviews his “inspiration,” cop-turned-author Joseph Wambaugh. Great bathroom reading, to be sure.

• ThugLit is back, this time with added ... er, punch. Offerings from the June-July edition include short stories by Keith Gilman (“Pay to Pray”), L.V. Rautenbaumgrabner (“The Baby-Smooth Skin of the Bank Manager and His Mistress”), Kim Cushman (“Simeon”), and Andy Turner (“Food in Search of a Country Song”). The issue’s full contents can be found here.

• The latest issue of Genre Flash, focusing on new crime novels and true-crime books being released in Australia, has just been released. (Hat tip to Crime Down Under.)

• Guest blogger and second-novelist Michelle Gagnon (Bone Yard) writes in the BookBitchBlog about the unexpected value of e-book readers. “I quickly became hooked,” she explains. “I didn’t expect to--I’m one of those people who wax eloquent over the feel of a book in my hands, the whisper of pages turning, blah blah blah ... But with a few months of intensive travel facing me as I braced for my next book tour, I decided to download some books. I was only going to use it for travel, I was still in control. I swear, I could stop any time I wanted. After taking it on a vacation to Mexico, I was hooked. I read a book a day, and never had to deliberate over the weight in my suitcase, or whether or not I should shed paperbacks en route like some strange molting creature. What I discovered is that this format suited my reading habits perfectly.” Read her whole post here.

• Kerrie Smith, proprietress of the Mysteries in Paradise blog, is the latest host of that traveling extravaganza known as the Carnival of the Criminal Minds. She takes an unconventional approach, noting some of her favorite genre reads (from the last three years!), the longlist of nominees for the 2008 Ned Kelly Awards, and a rather short list of Australian crime-fiction-related blogs. The Carnival’s next stop: Damien Gray’s Crime Down Under at the start of August. (So, when did this progressive blog feature go from being a fortnightly offering to a monthly one?)

• Shamus Award nominee Daniel Judson (The Darkest Place, The Water’s Edge) is guest blogging this week at St. Martin’s Minotaur’s Moments in Crime site. You’ll find his contributions here.

• Timed to the release of his new thriller, Deadline, Simon Kernick is July’s Author of the Month in CrimeSquad. Over the course of a short interview, he talks about chairing the 2008 Harrogate Crime Writing Festival, the boost he received from British TV co-hosts Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan (who chose his last novel, Relentless, as one of their summer reads for 2007), and his “favorite plot twist of all time,” from Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (“To come up with a twist like that in 1926, when that kind of literary sleight of hand was still in its infancy, was sheer genius.”)

• Although Roger Ackroyd doesn’t appear on Brian Skupin’s list of “five of the best mind-blowers ever written,” he does feature another Agatha Christie tale. “What’s a mind-blower?” Skupin muses in his introduction. “You might think it’s a surprise ending, but not necessarily. With your typical surprise ending, if you know in advance it’s going to be a surprise, then you can usually figure out what the surprise is going to be. Although some of the 5 short stories below do have surprises, knowing that won’t help you. And a couple of them don’t exactly have a surprise ending so much as an upsetting of all your expectations, leaving you flailing your arms with nothing to hold on to at the end.” You’ll find his five selections here.

• If ever there was a book jacket that screamed “summer reading pleasures,” it’s the one on the right. Too bad, then, that Linda Gerber’s Death by Bikini is a young adult novel.

• Actor Jeff Goldblum, who I so enjoyed in the too-short-lived NBC-TV series Raines, has reportedly been signed to replace Chris Noth on Law & Order: Criminal Intent. Adding to the eccentric appeal of Vincent D’Onofrio, Goldblum should make L&O: CI even more watchable, beginning in the fall.

• In other TV news: The Season 5 DVD set of Mission: Impossible--the year that both Sam Elliott and the lovely Lesley Ann Warren appeared on the show--is set to be released on October 7. A week later, stores should have in hand the initial season of Don Johnson’s series Nash Bridges. Meanwhile, Sharon Gless--former Cagney & Lacey star, and returning to small screens in next week’s season premiere of the USA Network’s spy spoof, Burn Notice--is interviewed by TV Squad.

• Since I’ve been writing about old San Francisco, it should come as no surprise that I was drawn to Anthony Flacco’s second novel, The Hidden Man, which happens to be set in that same city in 1915. Again featuring Randall Blackburn and his two adopted children (all introduced in 2007’s The Last Nightingale), the story this time is backdropped by San Francisco’s grandiose Panama-Pacific International Exposition. Flacco talks more about his tale in an interview with Poe’s Deadly Daughters. I found his explanation of why he’d given one of his characters Alzheimer’s disease to be of special interest. The full exchange can be found here.

• A (very) brief history of The Shadow, popularized by Walter Gibson in the 1930s and ’40s. (Hat tip to Bill Crider.)

• Author Jason Starr reports that his 2000 novel, Fake I.D.--previously published only in the UK--will be made available next year in Hard Case Crime paperback form.

• Finally, Salon movie critic Andrew O’Hehir admits he was “engrossed” by the French thriller Ne le dis à personne, adapted from Harlan Coben’s Tell No One (2001), and finally being released across the United States this month. Read his review here. And you can watch a brief trailer by clicking here.