A Long Night for Sleeping, has been nominated for the Bruce Alexander Memorial Award) has already begun her blogging from the event. Her opening post can be found here, with more to come.• Also posting from those Hawaiian festivities: Jeri Westerson.
• The latest edition of Mystery Scene magazine has landed at Rap Sheet headquarters, filled with the usual abundance of intriguing subject matter. Author S.J. Rozan (Shanghai Moon) captures the cover, but other contents include profiles of Larry Beinhart (Salvation Boulevard) and Linda L. Richards (Death Was in the Picture), fond looks back at Gregory Mcdonald’s Fletch novels and the 1960s Gene Barry TV series Burke’s Law, and the debut of Bill Crider’s new column about crime-fiction short stories. Sorry, but all of the magazine’s contents are not available online.
• Mike Ripley’s new “Getting Away with Murder” column for Shots includes applause for Morag Joss’ The Night Following and Leonardo Padura’s Havana Fever, bewilderment at the title of Jean-Francois Parot’s The Man with the Lead Stomach, excitement over the pending release of both Rennie Airth’s The Dead of Winter (his third Inspector John Madden novel) and Tony Black’s Gutted, and a bit of modesty concerning mention of Monsieur Ripley in two new reference works about British crime fiction.
• Barbara Martin’s “A Stash of Goods” is this week’s engaging short-story offering at Beat to a Pulp.
• Let us add our regrets to those already expressed concerning the demise on Saturday morning of attorney-turned-novelist Barbara Parker (The Dark of Day). She died in Florida “after a long illness.” She was only 62 years old. A complete list of her books is here. Parker’s Web site now invites readers to “leave a message about how her writing affected you.” Simply click here.
• Ian Rankin has written a new thriller?
• Australian novelist Marshall Browne, best known for his novels featuring disabled Roman detective Inspector Anders (The Wooden Leg of Inspector Anders, Inspector Anders and the Ship of Fools, etc.) seems determined to turn Franz Schmidt, his banker-spy operating in Nazi Germany, into another series star. Introduced in The Eye of the Abyss (2003), Schmidt now returns in the new historical thriller The Iron Heart, available from Random House Australia. More on Browne and Schmidt here and here.
• Jedediah Berry submits his quirky new novel, The Manual of Detection, to Marshal Zeringue’s notorious Page 69 Test. The results can be found here.
• Mark Krajnak is an amateur New Jersey photographer with a strong interest in noir themes. For a while now, he’s been developing a series of black-and-white shots suggestive of classic crime stories, a number of them featuring an unnamed femme fatale, and all with extended captions of a noirish nature. It’s an interesting series, and well worth a browse on some slow day. Click here.
• Sydney Chaplin, the third son of actor Charlie Chaplin, a stage performer, and a periodic guest star in TV crime dramas such as Switch and Baretta, died on March 3.
• A couple of months ago, I picked up on a meme that asked bloggers to list 16 random things about themselves. It took novelist and Rap Sheet blogger Mark Coggins a bit longer to develop a comparable list of facts about himself, but here they are.
• Speaking of Coggins, he’s dug into the Life magazine archive to find classic photographs of Dashiell Hammett and Mickey Spillane.
• CSI creator Anthony Zuiker is writing a digital novel.
• Sad to say, I wasn’t familiar with mid-20th-century paperback novelist Orrie Hitt (1916-1975) until a couple of months ago. But then Duane Swierczynski named Hitt as one of his “Legends of the Underwood,” and James Reasoner started to write some about Hitt’s career (see here and here). Today, Reasoner’s blog hosts a post about Hitt’s I’ll Call Every Monday. And I just stumbled across another post, this one at The Groovy Age of Horror, about Hitt’s 1961 novel, I Prowl by Night. Is the universe telling me that I’m supposed to check out this guy Orrin Hitt myself?
• And Rush Limburger never looked better.
No comments:
Post a Comment