Bullet Points: Procrastination Saturday Edition

• Novelist Len Deighton turned 80 years old on the 18th of this month. Not quite two weeks later, the British e-zine Shots has published a fine appreciation of Deighton and his genre-shaping contributions over the years. The package includes Rob Mallows’ fond tribute to the author, whose work he recalls discovering because of a teenage illness, and a selection of notes about Deighton’s books, written by Shots’ many contributors. The whole shebang can be read and enjoyed here.

• The Winter 2009 edition of Plots with Guns has finally been posted. Among the offerings are stories by Mark Raymond Falk (“Mikey’s Old Man”), Jason Hunt (“Avenging Angel”), and Neil Richter (“Skin Deep”). Lots of good stuff there.

• Here’s an interesting find. Most Rap Sheet readers, I’m willing to wager, think of Mike Connors as the star of Mannix (1967-1975) and maybe as the lead in Today’s F.B.I. (1981-1982). But how many remember his performance as a police undercover agent in the 1959-1960 CBS series Tightrope? If you need a reminder of that show, check out Mike Justice’s I Was a Bronze Age Boy blog.

• I haven’t yet received the February/March issue of Mystery News, but author Craig McDonald (Toros & Torsos) informs me that he penned the cover story: an interview with the too-darn-cute-to-be-so-devious-minded Megan Abbott, whose next novel, Bury Me Deep, is due out in July. An excerpt from their exchange is available here.

• Peter Rozovsky alerts me to the fact that the next Noir at the Bar author event will be held in Toronto, Ontario, on Tuesday, March 10. Featured stars of that show are authors Sean Chercover (Big City, Bad Blood and Trigger City) and Howard Shrier (Buffalo Jump and High Chicago). The venue this time will be the Scotland Yard Pub, 56 The Esplanade, beginning at 7:30 pm.

• Veteran detective novelist Robert B. Parker (Night and Day) talks with The Wall Street Journal about “mystery, marriage, and the American hero.” Meanwhile, Thin Ice, the fifth Tom Selleck teleflick to be based on Parker’s Jesse Stone character, will be shown on Sunday night on CBS, beginning at 9 p.m.

• While explaining the roots and intentions of his newly released detective novel, Last Days, author Brian Evenson recalls his discovery of Dashiell Hammett’s fiction:

[Raymond] Chandler has become so much a part of popular culture that even if you haven’t read him, he feels familiar. The amazing thing about Hammett is that at his best he doesn’t feel familiar. There are moments in Red Harvest that are beautifully brutal, other moments that are quite stark, stripped down in a different way than Chandler. You get the sense that Hammett is making his genre up as he goes, that almost anything could happen, and that he’s not interested in pulling his punches. The other books were buzzing in my head, but Red Harvest was buzzing louder. Then the cult he creates in The Dain Curse started buzzing too. Those two books seemed to be calling out to me to do something of my own, but I still didn’t have my big idea.

The full load of Evenson’s comments can be found in author John Scalzi’s blog, Whatever.

• How many lightbulbs does it take to constitute a trend?

• No surprise here: author-screenwriter Stephen J. Cannell tells Declan Burke of Crime Always Pays that the fictional character he “would ... most like to have been” was private eye Jim Rockford.

• How did I miss this? Atlantic Books, a British subsidiary of the American publishing house Grove/Atlantic, is rolling out a series of crime-fiction classics, some of them featuring terrifically cool covers.

• Cuban crime novelist José Latour puts his latest book, Crime of Fashion, through the wringer known as Marshal Zeringue’s Page 69 Test. The results are here.

• Guest blogger Steve Steinbock writes at Murderati about what he sees missing from sex scenes penned by men.

• When I heard earlier this week that author Philip José Farmer had died at age 91, I thought immediately of his famous Riverworld series, which I tried to read--unsuccessfully, I should note--back when I was a teenager. But I couldn’t immediately find a crime-fiction angle in the demise of this man who was so well known for his science fiction. Thankfully, Jiro Kimura of The Gumshoe Site did a better job of research. As he explains on his site, Farmer “may have been famous as a science fiction writer, but he wrote a couple of mystery novels and a number of mystery short stories. The Image of the Beast (Essex, 1968) is a pornographic novel featuring a private eye. The Adventure of the Peerless Peer (Aspen, 1974) is a Sherlockian pastiche. “The Problem of the Sore Bridge--Among Others,” also a Sherlockian pastiche, as by “Harry Manders,” was first printed in the September 1975 issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and included in Riverworld and Other Stories (Berkley, 1979). He also contributed a chapter for Naked Came the Farmer (Mayfly, 1998; edited by Bill Knight), a round-robin mystery novel.”

• Why am I not surprised by this?

• Edgar Award winner Jeffrey Ford (The Shadow Year) has begun exploring the works of French crime novelist Georges Simenon, wondering “what other kinds of exotic fictions I will find among his books.” See his posts here and here.

• “[Derek] Raymond’s brilliance in his British version of noir fiction stems from his ability to cross-pollinate the form with a bracing existentialism and dark exploration of memory and sadness,” writes Omnivoracious’ Jeff VanderMeer of Raymond’s famous Factory novels. “Even today, with the explosion of interesting hybrids by authors like Ken Bruen, Raymond manages to shock and amaze in his mixture of the hard-boiled and the lyrical. (Not to mention, a surprising gruff humor.)” Read more here.

• The latest short-story offering from Beat to a Pulp: “The Unreal Jesse James,” by Chap O’Keefe.

• Finally, the big-screen version of Stieg Larsson’s highly publicized debut novel, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2008), was released yesterday in Sweden. Uriah Robinson’s Crime Scraps blog has more on this subject.

(Hat tips to Brian Lindenmuth.)