Bullet Points: Almost Bouchercon Edition

• With next month’s release of Quantum of Solace, the 22nd James Bond film, everybody’s trying to capitalize on 007. That includes novelist Raymond Benson, who penned a series of Bond novels during the 1990s. According to a press release, three of Benson’s Bond yarns will be collected in The Union Trilogy (Pegasus Books).

Several authors have been commissioned by Ian Fleming’s Estate to pen 007 novels throughout the years, but Benson is unique in that he was the only American to have the privilege. In total, Benson wrote six original Bond novels, three film novelizations, and three short stories. The Union Trilogy consists of three of the original books--High Time to Kill, Doubleshot, and Never Dream of Dying--as well as the full-length, “director’s cut” of the short story Blast from the Past, which originally appeared in a shortened form in Playboy magazine. A new introduction by the author is also included.

• Meanwhile, the November edition of Vanity Fair carries this calendar note: “The adage that you can’t judge a book by its cover is put to the test by [the auction house] Bonhams & Butterfields, in Los Angeles, which hosts a charity exhibition of the more evocative--and provocative--James Bond book-cover illustrations from the past century.” The exhibition will be held from November 11 to 18. More information is available here.

• Oh, and speaking of reissues ... Soho Constable, the promising new joint venture between New York publisher Soho Press and British house Constable & Robinson, is bringing back into print Peter Lovesey’s classic Victorian-era crime series featuring Sergeant Cribb and Constable Thackery. The first two books from that series--Wobble to Death (1970) and The Detective Wore Silk Drawers (1971)--are already available. And Soho Constable promises to issue the remaining half-dozen Cribb installments “over the coming seasons.” The Cribb books were the first historical crime novels I discovered in my early adulthood, and I’m pleased that other, younger readers will now have the chance to discover them, too.

• Somehow I’ve never envisaged actress Rachel McAdams as Irene Adler, Sherlock Holmes’ most charming and challenging nemesis. But then, I’m not film director Guy Ritchie.

• Dan Waddell, author of the new novel The Blood Detective, which imagines parallel serial-killer investigations, 125 years apart, is the subject of this month’s “Fresh Blood” feature in Crime Squad.

• Let’s all welcome David Thompson, the creator of Busted Flush Press and assistant manager of Houston’s renowned Murder By the Book store, to the blogosphere.

• From Shelf Awareness: “Michael Connelly has won the 2009 Carvalho Prize and will accept it during the BCNegra crime festival in Barcelona, Spain, next February. The jury consists of Spanish writers, booksellers and journalists. The prize is named for a literary private detective, Pepe Carvalho, created by the late Manuel Vázquez Montalbán.” (Hat tip to Euro Crime.)

• Author-blogger Keith Raffel gets Exposed with Alex Kava.

• And is it only my perception, or is John McCain willing to stoop to any low and forsake whatever honor he once claimed in order to be elected president? Nope, I guess it isn’t only my perception.