Of Mosley, Nazis, and Gold Medals

• Just in time for this week’s commemoration of the 50th anniversary of Raymond Chandler’s demise: British publisher Penguin/Hamish Hamilton is set to reissue classic UK editions of his novels. Just the thing to give to any friends who have missed out on reading Chandler before ... or to add to your own library.

• Meanwhile, Jake Kerridge writes in The Telegraph that Chandler’s novels “should be judged not as escapism but as art.” Don’t look at me to disagree. (Hat tip to Sarah Weinman.)

• Courtesy of Needle Scratch Static comes a video of Walter Mosley discussing his brand-new novel, The Long Fall, the opening installment in a series starring modern-day New York private eye Leonid McGill. And here’s Publishers Weekly’s synopsis of the story:

McGill, a 53-year-old former boxer who’s still a fighter, finds out that putting his past life behind him isn’t easy when someone like Tony “The Suit” Towers expects you to do a job; when an Albany P.I. hires you to track down four men known only by their youthful street names; and when your 16-year-old son, Twill, is getting in over his head with a suicidal girl. McGill shares Easy [Rawlins]’s knack for earning powerful friends by performing favors and has some of the toughness of Fearless [Jones], but he’s got his own dark secrets and hard-won philosophy. New York’s racial stew is different than Los Angeles’s, and Mosley stirs the pot and concocts a perfect milieu for an engaging new hero and an entertaining new series.

It’s hard not to look forward to seeing this one.

• British novelist Philip Kerr talks with The Wall Street Journal’s Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg about his research methodology, anti-Semitism in post-World War II Argentina, and of course his new novel (new in the States, anyway), A Quiet Flame, the fifth entry in his acclaimed Bernie Gunther series. The results of their exchange can be found here.

• Library Journal sits down with lawyer-turned-novelist John Hart to discuss his prose style, his latest novel, The Last Child, and why he chose to fictionalize the setting of that new story. Click here to read the full but short piece.

• David Hewson has some ideas about how to cast a future movie made from his seventh Nic Costa series, Dante’s Numbers.

• “I had been wondering if any of my favorite crime writers had ever done non-fiction writing (or at least, writing not necessarily categorized as ‘fiction’), and low-and-behold I stumbled upon this collection,” Cullen Gallagher writes in introducing the 1992 vintage true-crime anthology, Murder Plus. “Craig Rice, Harry Whittington, Jim Thompson, Robert Bloch, Day Keene, to name just a few--it seemed too good to be true. Having just finished the book this evening, it certainly is true, and [editor Marc] Gerald’s selection certainly doesn’t disappoint. Murderesses of every variety (from paranoid mothers to double-time wives to outright loonies), scheming businessmen, movie directors with shady pasts, and war heroes that don’t live up to their reputation are just a sampling of the captivating criminal element housed within Murder Plus.”

• It’s hard to believe that David Cranmer’s Beat to a Pulp is already more than three months old, but I guess it is, since its 15th weekly short-story offering, Ray Foster’s “In an English Country Garden,” has just been posted.

• Finally, Michael Blowhard offers up a tribute to the old Gold Medal Books line of paperbacks. “Gold Medal was emphatically a business,” he writes, “and anything but a high-minded one--reserving, for example, the right to do with the books’ covers what it pleased, which included not just choosing the art but also the title. Still, the writers generally liked the work. Gold Medal dealt with them fair and square, relatively speaking. Editing was quick and to-the-point. Snobbery was nonexistent. If Gold Medal retitled your book, well, what the hell, and on to the next one.”