Bullet Points: Thursday Stimulus Edition

• Today is apparently William Shakespeare’s birthday. In commemoration, editor-blogger Janet Rudolph has put together a list of Shakespearean whodunits for your reading pleasure.

• This weekend brings the annual Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. We’ll have our man Mark Coggins on the scene, taking photos and chatting up authors. (Say hello if you spot him wandering by.) Even before those festivities begin, though, the Mystery Bookstore in Westwood and the Mystery Writers of America will host a party at the store tomorrow night. Lee Goldberg has the specifics. It looks as if anybody and everybody is invited. Should be a good time.

• Award-winning comic-book artist Darwyn Cooke’s hardcover adaptation of The Hunter, the first of Donald E. Westlake’s novels featuring hard-boiled criminal Parker (published under the pseudonym Richard Stark), won’t be released until July. But to whet reader appetites, a 20-page preview of the work has been made available here. (Hat tip to Independent Crime.)

• My radar somehow missed the release of Hit List: The Best of Latino Mystery, when it was released last month. But I am hoping to get a copy of that short-story collection, which was edited by Sarah Cortez and Liz Martinez. (Hat tip to In Reference to Murder.)

• Frank Bill has yet another story in Beat to a Pulp: “The Need.”

• Sadly, it appears that Joe Barone’s literary efforts haven’t earned him a permanent spot with St. Martin’s/Minotaur Books. “Yesterday,” he writes in his blog, “I received word that my book The Body in the Record Room had not sold well enough for St. Martin’s to continue publishing my writing.” This, despite that historical novel having gleaned a number of favorable reviews (see here, here, and here). Fortunately, Barone doesn’t sound too discouraged by this turn. “What happens to my writing is not the issue. Especially since I will just keep on writing,” he promises.

• Louise Ure has tales to tell about her book covers.

• In The Guardian, Brian McGilloway (Bleed a River Deep) names his picks of the top 10 modern Irish crime novels. Interestingly, it’s quite a different list from the one Declan Burke assembled last year for The Rap Sheet. Lots of reading choices.

• Lesa Holstine of Lesa’s Book Critiques continues to interview “some of the authors whose books have been nominated for an Edgar Award for Best First Novel by an American Author.” Most recently Holstine has managed to bag Justin Peacock (A Cure for Night) and Tom Epperson (The Kind One).

• Stefanie Pintoff has submitted her brand-new historical mystery, In the Shadow of Gotham, to Marshal Zeringue’s daunting Page 69 Test. The results are here. Meanwhile, Libby Hellmann has some casting suggestions for a film made from her fifth novel, Easy Innocence. She explains here.

• J.A. Konrath interviews Marshall Karp (Flipping Out).

• Finally, it looks as though Patricia Cornwell’s protagonist, Kay Scarpetta, may be set to star in a series of theatrical movies, with the much-overused Angelina Jolie playing that fictional Virginia medical examiner. However, as Lee Goldberg points out, Fox has acquired the rights to Cornwell’s books but intends to “use them as inspiration for new tales,” rather than adapt the original novels for the big screen. “In other words,” Goldberg explains, “they’ll be taking the titles and not much else ... which makes some sense, since the forensics that seemed so cutting edge when Postmortem first came out [in 1990] have been done to death on the small screen with the three CSI series, NCIS, etc.”