Bullet Points: Not the Mother’s Day Edition

• The 2009 prizes season continues, this time with the editors of Crimespree Magazine asking readers to send in their nominations in five Crimespree Award categories:

-- Favorite book of 2008
-- Best [book] in an ongoing series
-- Favorite graphic novel or comics writer
-- Favorite original paperback (mass market or trade)
-- Favorite mystery bookstore

“Voting is open to anyone,” editor Jon Jordan explains. Just e-mail your nominations to: Jon@crimespreemag.com. The deadline for these suggestions is July 31.

• The latest short-story offering at Beat to a Pulp is “Spend It Now, Pay Later,” by Nik Morton, which Pulp Serenade’s Cullen Gallagher describes as “an unsettling and timely story of a single mother caught in an economic depression who jumps at an opportunity to get herself out of debt and build a future for her daughter.” The price she must ultimately pay, however, isn’t pretty.

• The schedule for July’s Harrogate Crime Writing Festival is out, and I’m officially jealous of everybody who can attend.

• America’s recession has now hit even Hard Case Crime.

• The Private Eye Writers of America is accepting submissions of works to be considered for its 2009 Shamus Awards.

• Issue number two of Gerald So’s The Lineup: Poems on Crime is now on sale. Contributions come from Patrick Carrington, Reed Farrel Coleman, Sophie Hannah, John Harvey, Janis Butler Holm, Jennifer L. Knox, Amy MacLennan, Carol Novack, Deshant Paul, Karen Petersen, Manuel Ramos, Stephen D. Rogers, and Christopher Watkins. Go ahead, spring for the $6.

• A new Web discovery: Pulp International. It’s not all about crime fiction, but it certainly offers some wonderful treats in this field.

• BookSpot Central’s Brian Lindenmuth carries on his wonderful “Conversations with the Bookless.” His latest interviews with “writers who are up and coming, [but] who don’t yet have a collection or a novel out” include those with Claude Lalumière, Clair Dickson, and Kieran Shea.

• A few weeks back, I noted the trend toward putting shadowy, running men on the covers of today’s thriller novels. But it seems this convention is more ubiquitous than I imagined. See here, here, and here. Do book designers really need to run this theme to death?

• Booklist has published it’s rundown of the “10 Best Crime Novels of the Year,” as chosen by critic Bill Ott. Oddly, they’re actually what Ott thinks are the 10 best specimens published between May 2008 and April 2009. (Who’s year is that?) More interesting is his list of the “10 Best Crime Novel Debuts,” only one of which I’ve read.

• British novelist John Harvey just published his 100th book? Drat, it looks as if I’ll never catch up with reading his stuff.

• Greg Rucka talks with Crimespree’s Ruth Jordan about his new novel, Walking Dead, a work that focuses around “the global epidemic of human trafficking.”

• Meanwhile, Philadelphia blogger Peter Rozovsky--who will be in the UK later this week, attending CrimeFest 2009--interviews one of that convention’s guests of honor, Håkan Nesser, on the subject of his new (in the States, anyway) novel, Woman with Birthmark. Read all of their exchange here.

• Rap Sheet contributor Jim Winter’s slowly rolling-out online novel, Road Rules, is now also available via podcast. Listen here.

• HBO-TV has picked up David Simon’s new series Treme, “a character drama that looks at the lives of New Orleans musicians in the post-Katrina reconstruction.” Watch for it this coming fall.

• I’ve just begun reading Rennie Airth’s third novel about former Scotland Yard inspector John Madden, The Dead of Winter (released recently in the UK, and due on American bookshelves in July). So I was pleased to discover that this South African-born writer is the May “Author of the Month” in CrimeSquad. Even better is learning, from that article, that Airth may not be done with his man Madden. “I started out with the intention of writing a trilogy,” he explains, “but now I feel I have at least one more book to write about my characters. More than that, I can’t say.”

• Adrian McKinty (Fifty Grand) is the subject of this month’s author focus in New Mystery Reader. He is interviewed here.

• Not only has British critic Gordon Harries joined The Rap Sheet’s stable of contributors, but he’s also relaunched his own blog, Needle Scratch Static. Today he has posted there a good-size essay about the recent BBC-TV crime drama Moses Jones. Harries says he’s planning similarly sized new essays every Monday.

• Raymond Chandler is to be the subject of an upcoming installment of PBS-TV’s American Masters series. I don’t see any air date publicized yet, but here’s a brief description of the 90-minute episode: “A master of language and observation, the name Raymond Chandler is synonymous with that most American of literary forms--crime fiction. With such seminal works as The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye and Farewell, My Lovely, Chandler and his first-person alter ego Philip Marlowe transformed pulp, establishing and ever influencing a new genre of the written word. On the big screen, his Double Indemnity marked the advent of Film Noir and was followed by movie adaptations of most of his major works. A loner and an alcoholic who didn’t publish his first book until age 51, his personal life often equaled the mysterious twists of his unique, Los Angeles-based, fiction. Best told in readings from his brilliant, acerbic letters and by the artists who drew from his life--among them Walter Mosley, James Ellroy, Joan Didion and Robert Towne--Chandler’s story unfolds.” (Hat tip to Kari E. Johnson.)

• Speaking of Chandler, Ali Karim reports that UK publisher Faber and Faber has recruited critic, editor, and former bookstore proprietor Maxim Jakubowski, along with film expert Adrian Wootton to conduct a “one-day course on the life and works of the man without whom crime fiction as it is today might never have existed.” This Chandler seminar is going to take place on Saturday, September 12. More details are here.

• With the TV series Wallander having just debuted in the States on PBS, here comes news that author Henning Mankell’s first new Kurt Wallander novel in a decade, The Nervous Man (a rough translation of the title, I guess), will be published in Sweden in August. Now for the bad news: This might also be Mankell’s last Wallander yarn.

• Randy Johnson recalls Donald E. Westlake’s four Samuel Holt novels, beginning with One of Us Is Wrong (1986).

• Molly Pesce, the host of Barnes & Noble’s Tagged! series, interviews Michael Connelly, who talks about his soon-forthcoming Jack McEvoy novel, The Scarecrow.

• Canadian novelist Maureen Jennings, creator of the historical Detective William Murdoch mysteries, has been asked to contribute to Britain’s Quick Reads series of short novels for “emergent readers,” according to a note from her husband, Iden Ford. The Quick Reads series features “tales of crime, romance, adventure, and mystery” from authors such as Minette Walters, Maeve Binchy, Josephine Cox, and Chris Ryan. The new Murdoch story is expected on store shelves in 2010.

• Oh, tell me it ain’t so: In-N-Out, my favorite fast-food burger chain in California, could be in line for changes.