Bullet Points: Pre-election Edition

• The November installment of Mike Ripley’s “Getting Away with Murder” column has been posted in Shots in an unusually on-time manner. This month he offers notes from the recent Ellis Peters Awards presentation, recommendations of some 2009 titles to watch for (especially Aly Monroe’s The Maze of Cadiz and Tom Bradby’s Blood Money), word of a new “Otto Penzler Facsimile Reprint Series,” and an alert concerning a novel that places Sherlock Holmes in, of all places, Russia. Look for the full column here.

• Ken Bruen today begins a week-long stint guest blogging for St. Martin’s Minotaur’s Moments in Crime.

• The Carnival of the Criminal Minds has pulled up once more at B.V. Lawson’s In Reference to Murder site. I should have noted this a couple of days ago, because Lawson’s focus is on Halloween goodies and dark suspense.

• Agatha Christie graphic novels? Writes Kerrie Smith of Mysteries in Paradise: “I hope nobody is kidding themselves that these comics, a total of 83 titles, are going to turn anybody into a reader of the Agatha Christie classics! The connection between this ‘graphic novel’ and the original novel is just the main elements of the story. There is no suspense, and really none of what attracted readers to Agatha Christie’s books.”

• Short-story writer Kyle Minor won particular notice this last summer, thanks to a story he placed in Plots with Guns, “They Take You.” He also has a new collection out in bookstores this week, In the Devil’s Territory. And now author Laura Benedict (Isabella Moon) has asked him to contribute to her blog, Notes from the Handbasket. He writes today about “Ten Books I Hope My Children Will Read Before They Turn Twenty.”

• TV Squad’s Bob Sassone has the first review I’ve seen of M Squad: The Complete Series, starring Lee Marvin.

• How much do you know about James Bond?

• Science Daily looks back at some of Bond’s foes, and finds that they aren’t as unbelievable as they once seemed. (Hat tip to Detectives Beyond Borders.)

• Nathan Cain of Independent Crime points me to an “interactive video and slideshow gallery from the L.A. Times documenting the LAPD’s post-WWII Gangster Squad, a unit formed to combat organized crime in the city.”

• Elaine Flinn’s last post.

• The latest edition of Mystery Readers Journal focuses on “San Francisco Bay Area Mysteries.” Contributions come from David Corbett, our own Mark Coggins, Meg Gardiner, Tim Maleeny, Lisa Lutz, David Skibbins, and Sheldon Siegel, among others.

• Speaking of new editions, I just received a copy of the October/November Mystery News, which carries a cover feature about Ann Cleeves (White Nights), an interview with Ian Vasquez (In the Heat), and a glance back to the work of E. Phillips Oppenheim, once known as “the Prince of Storytellers.”

• Blazing! Adventures Magazine puts its first print edition on sale ($12 per copy). The regular, online edition can be found here.

• In Pulp Pusher, author Christa Faust explains what she hoped to achieve by writing about the porn industry in Money Shot, which she describes as “I, the Jury with tits.”

• And it was on this day in 1883 that notorious California outlaw Black Bart began robbing stagecoaches, recalls Nobody Move!