Quick and Dirty

• Mike Ripley is back with a new edition of “Getting Away with Murder,” his wonderfully droll Shots column about the British mystery-fiction scene. In this month’s installment, he celebrates debut novels by Jeremy Duns and Stav Sherez, touts the forthcoming non-crime release from Robert Ryan (Death on the Ice, “a magisterial piece of historical fiction which looks at that ‘worst journey in the world’--the race to be the first to reach the South Pole in 1912”), and suggests that Elizabeth Wilson’s new War Damage (which “charts the psychological damage inflicted by the Second World War on a disparate group of middle class would-be Bohemians most of whom struggle to keep up appearances in a changing social order”) might be a candidate for the Ellis Peters Historical Award.

• Martin Edwards shares his memories of historical novelist Michael Cox (The Meaning of Night and The Glass of Time), who died of cancer earlier this week at age 60. Click here to read more.

• This week’s short-story offering at Beat to a Pulp: “Preferred Customer, by Mike Sheeter.

• Chris Simms, whose new Detective Inspector John Spicer novel, The Edge, will be released later this month, talks with blogger Col Bury about his book deals, his writing discipline, the creation of protagonist Spicer, and his fictional use of real locations in and around Manchester, England. Their full exchange can be found here.

• What’s this about a connection between Agatha Christie’s bestselling novels and Alzheimer’s disease?

• For lovers of crime- and spy-fiction-related jazz. (Hat tip to Permission to Kill.)

• There’s no question the Irish writer Gene Kerrigan (Dark Times in the City) is a sharp writer. But he’s also a quick wit. When asked by blogger Declan Burke what choice he would make if “God appears and says you can only write OR read,” Kerrigan responds: “I couldn’t live without reading. I couldn’t make a living without writing. I’d tell him to go find something constructive to do. And there’s no shortage of things need doing, God knows.” Read more here.