High Five

• Well, here’s one way to build up reader interest in your news novel: Michael Connelly has teamed with fellow author Terrill Lee Lankford (Earthquake Weather, Blonde Lightning) to create a three-part film companion to Connelly’s forthcoming Jack McEvoy novel, The Scarecrow. The first installment can be found here, with a second to be released next Tuesday, and the finale to come on May 26, the official Scarecrow release date.

• Everybody’s doing the podcast thing, it seems. The prolific James Reasoner, once a Brett Halliday stand-in and now author of the first Gabriel Hunt adventure thriller, Hunt at the Well of Eternity, is interviewed by Jeff Rutherford of the Reading and Writing Podcast. You can listen to their exchange here. Meanwhile, some of the contributors to the second edition of Gerald So’s The Lineup: Poems on Crime read their work for this week’s broadcast at CrimeWAV.com.

• Here’s something I didn’t know: Warner Bros. is going to make a film out of Jed Rubenfeld’s 2006 historical thriller, The Interpretation of Murder, which I chose as one of January Magazine’s favorite books of that year. (Hat tip to B.V. Lawson’s In Reference to Murder.)

• The mother and son who write historical mysteries as “Charles Todd” have decided that, after penning 11 post-World War I stories about shell-shocked Scotland Yard Inspector Ian Rutledge, they should try their hands at a new series, though not a new time period. Beginning with A Duty to the Dead (due out in August from HarperCollins), this second series will star a battlefield nurse named Bess Crawford. (Hat tip to Oline H. Cogdill.)

• Booklist picks its top 10 crime novels of 2009 for young readers.