The Fab Five

Houston technical writer and aspiring novelist Scott D. Parker, who also pens a terrific, self-named blog celebrating the range and promise of crime fiction, was kind enough to tag The Rap Sheet as part of the current Five Fabulous Blogs meme. This meme has been making the rounds, and though I haven’t yet made any new discoveries among the recommendations, I’m glad to see so many creative bloggers being heralded so prominently.

The rules of this game are simple:

• You must include the person that gave you the award, and link it back to them. (OK, consider that assignment done already.)
• You must list five of your Fabulous Addictions in the post. (That means five blog addictions, plus five other addictions of a personal nature.)
• You must copy and paste these rules in the post.
• Right-click the award icon and save it to your computer, then post it with your own awards. (Also understood, and done.)

As you can see by the lengthy blog links list on the right-hand side of this page, I follow many more than five of these Weblogs. So narrowing my list down requires severe restraint. My choice is to list five that I have not already seen mentioned elsewhere, just so readers enjoy the widest assortment of possibilities.

Here are my Five Must-Follow Blogs:

• Thrilling Days of Yesteryear
• Noir of the Week
• Lies! Damned Lies!
• Gravetapping
• Caustic Cover Critic

Yeah, yeah, I’m cheating, but here’s a sixth blog: Political Animal.

The next thing is to list five addictions. Understand, the things that interest me most tend to change on a weekly basis, if not a daily one. I’m a near-unquenchable consumer of news, history, literature, television, and trivia. But focusing only on my five latest addictions leads to this list:

• Erle Stanley Gardner’s Bertha Cool and Donald Lam novels
• Pulp paperback covers
• Historical photos of cities (I wrote two photographic histories last year--of San Francisco and Seattle--and haven’t yet lost my fascination with long-gone cityscapes)
• Nonpareils
• Reading on my front porch (which will be a whole lot more comfortable, once spring finally arrives in Seattle)

Let me express my thanks again to Mr. Parker, for recommending The Rap Sheet to his loyal readership.