Say It With Bullets

• January Magazine editor and Rap Sheet contributor Linda L. Richards, whose new historical mystery, Death Was in the Picture, was released last month, returns this week as a guest writer at Minotaur Books’ Moments in Crime blog.

• In anticipation of the release of his ninth Ben Cooper and Diane Fry mystery, The Kill Call (due out from HarperCollins UK in April), British novelist Stephen Booth has launched his own blog.

• The second edition of the Webzine Crooked, featuring work by Clair Dickson, Patricia Abbott, Keith Rawson, and others, is now available. There’s also a new story to be read in Beat the Pulp: “Pajama Party,” by Stephen D. Rogers. And the January/February 2009 edition of ThugLit has finally been posted. Irish blogger Gerard Brennan is one of the contributors (with a short story called “Hard Rock”), along with Tyler Midkiff (“The Secret Dies with Denny”), C.G. Bauer (“You’re a Moron”), and several others.

• Another reason to go on living: Among the titles on publisher Crippen & Landru’s list of forthcoming books is The Columbo Stories, by William Link. Link, you will recall, was the co-creator (with Richard Levinson) of such classic TV crime dramas as Columbo, Mannix, and Ellery Queen. That he has this collection due out of “14 new stories” about LAPD Lieutenant Columbo is something worth looking forward to, indeed. No word yet on when the book will be available for purchase, however.

• British writer Sophie Hannah talks about her latest novel, The Other Half Lives, with Crime Squad. You’ll find the interview here.

• Appropriate to the fact that February is Black History Month, National Public Radio’s Tony Cox talks with Paula Woods, Gar Anthony Haywood, and Gary Phillips about how African-American writers make the crime-fiction genre their own. Listen here.

• The Australian crime-fiction blog It’s Criminal plays host to the latest three-ring, all-star Carnival of the Criminal Minds. Among other things, its writer, Helen Lloyd, directs our attention toward new blogs by Reg Keeland (Stieg Larsson’s translator) and V.I. Warshawski creator Sara Paretsky; Peter Rozovsky’s interview with Mehmet Mural Somer, author of The Kiss Murders, at Detectives Beyond Borders; and AustCrime’s summary of early Australian crime-fiction writers. The Carnival moves in the middle of this month to series organizer Barbara Fister’s own blog.

• Over a Crimespree Cinema, Jon Jordan is asking readers to nominate the “classic police or private-eye-related show ... you think needs to be released on DVD.” My picks? City of Angels, The Outsider, Banyon, Private Eye, Petrocelli, and the Joseph Wambaugh anthology series Police Story. Make your own choices known here.

• The Tainted Archive features a fine interview with Megan Abbott, in which the author gives us the lowdown on her next noirish work, Bury Me Deep, due out in July from Simon & Schuster. “It’s loosely based on a famous real-life 1930s tabloid case known as the Winnie Ruth Judd Trunk Murders. This lovely young woman is left by her husband in Phoenix, Arizona, at the height of the Great Depression. Very naïve, very lonely, she falls in with these two pretty wild party girls in town. There’s a man involved, a charmer and one of the town’s big players. And things quickly turn very, very dark. I wanted to mix what might be kind of a classic Edith Wharton-style dilemma--a lonely woman slipping from propriety to decadence--with a pulp plot and style. Sort of knock those two sensibilities together and what happened.”

• The Aussie graphic designer behind Permission to Kill, a blog devoted to “the best spy films from around the globe,” has kicked off a new series of posts, highlighting notable theme music from spy flicks. My favorite so far comes from Our Man Flint.

• Funny stuff, indeed: Declan Burke’s 39 steps to getting published as an Irish author.

• For The Wall Street Journal, historian and author Arthur Herman (How the Scots Invented the Modern World, Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry That Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age) chooses his five favorite books about Scotland Yard.

• Finally, author and onetime Vienna resident J. Sydney Jones submits his new historical mystery, The Empty Mirror (set in Vienna, Austria, in 1898 with a cast that includes painter Gustav Klimt and criminologist Hanns Gross), to Marshal Zeringue’s acclaimed Page 69 Test. Click here to read the results. By the way, a note at Jones’ Web site teases fans of The Empty Mirror with a synopsis of its sequel: “Requiem in Vienna, the second installment in the Viennese Mysteries series, will appear in 2010. [Lawyer Karl] Werthen and Gross are faced with their most challenging case yet, attempting to prevent a brutal murder from occurring. The likely victim? Gustav Mahler, composer and director of Vienna’s Court Opera.”