Bits and Pieces

• A crime and justice site called e-Justice Blog includes The Rap Sheet on its list of “The Top 50 Detective Blogs.” Actually, that club is more exclusive than the post title suggests, because most of the sites chosen are associated with real-life law-enforcement agencies and private investigators on both sides of the Atlantic. The Rap Sheet is one of only 10 crime-fiction-related blogs, along with Peter Rozovsky’s Detectives Beyond Borders, Kevin Burton Smith’s The Thrilling Detective Blog, Stephen Blackmoore’s L.A. Noir, the collaborative blog Murderati, and others.

• Today is the 75th birthday of Lou Antonio. The face of this actor turned TV director may be most familiar from a celebrated episode of the original Star Trek series, in which he played a (literally) half-black, half-white alien escapee who brought his world’s racist war aboard the Enterprise. However, he also co-starred with Helen Hayes and Midred Natwick in the under-appreciated NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie series The Snoop Sisters (1973-1974), and with Lee Grant in a 1973 NBC-TV pilot called Partners in Crime, from Columbo creators William Link and Richard Levinson. Antonio later starred with Kim Basinger in a late ’70s crime drama called Dog and Cat. He’s better known nowadays for his work behind the camera, having directed such shows as Boston Legal, The West Wing, and CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. A full list of his credits can be found here.

• This being Friday, the Web is naturally filled with “forgotten crime novel” recommendations. Among the picks: Murder of a Mistress, by Henry Kuttner; This Girl for Hire, by G.G. Fickling; What Really Happened, by Brett Halliday; The Case of the Angry Actress, by E.V. Cunningham; Tragedy at Law, by Cyril Hare; Murder on the Side, by Day Keene; and The Fabulous Clip Joint, by Fredric Brown. A complete rundown of today’s participating bloggers can be found here, along with a few additional book choices, including The Doomsters, by Ross Macdonald.

• And the short-story site Twist of Noir is holding its first-ever fiction-writing contest. Submissions can run up to 5,000 words in length, and their theme should be alienation. The deadline for getting your work in is March 31. Full details here.