Out for a Spin

• Last week we told you about a three-part film put together by author Michael Connelly and Terrill Lee Lankford to promote Connelly’s forthcoming new novel, The Scarecrow. Conflict of Interest tells an intersecting story, one that follows FBI Agent Rachel Walling before she enters the action in Scarecrow. Part I of that film short can be enjoyed here. Part II was just posted today; look for it here. The final installment is due out on May 26, the official Scarecrow release date.

• As the Chicago Tribune reports, it was fate that led author Connelly to set his famous Harry Bosch series of novels in Los Angeles. The character might just as easily have become a Windy City sleuth. (Hat tip to In Reference to Murder.)

• I’ve been thinking for a while about putting together a collection of classic “peeping tom” book jackets, either for The Rap Sheet or its companion blog, Killer Covers. However, it seems that the folks over at the Good Girl Art Web site did the work for me. Click here for an eyeful.

• More memories of this year’s CrimeFest, this time coming from Petrona, Declan Burke, Martin Edwards, and Michael Walters.

• Jeri Westerson has posted a very fine interview with Louise Penny, the Macavity Award-winning author of A Rule Against Murder.

• Anthony Neil Smith has begun a “virtual rally” to promote his new novel, Hogdoggin’, due out from Bleak House Books next month. He’s already made stops at Nathan Cain’s Independent Crime and Gordon Harries’ Needle Scratch Static.

• Dan Brown--“the Rodney Dangerfield of authors”?

• Law & Order has been renewed for a 20th season on NBC-TV. That ties the record previously held by the James Arness Western, Gunsmoke (though Gunsmoke is still way out in front in terms of episodes produced). Unfortunately, NBC’s Jay Leno-heavy fall TV schedule calls for L&O to move to Fridays at 8 p.m.--not exactly big-time ratings territory, and perhaps the beginning of the end for this show that has spawned several sequels. All in all, NBC’s fall schedule is unimpressive--a personal disappointment, given my fondness for many of its 1970s and ’80s crime dramas.

• Crimespree Magazine’s Jon Jordan talks with Andrew Grant, author of the new novel Even and the younger brother of mondo-best-selling writer Lee Child.

• This is the most fun blog I’ve seen in a long time.

• John Kenyon takes a run at the prolific Lawrence Block’s brand-new Step by Step: A Pedestrian Memoir, which he notes (threatens?) could be Block’s final book. Read more here.

• Michael Carlson turns a cynical eye on the latest in a series of works about Elizabeth Short, better remembered as the 1947 L.A. murder victim “The Black Dahlia.”

• How did Hard Case Crime acquire rights to The Dead Man’s Brother, the long-lost mystery novel by science-fiction author Roger Zelazny? Find out here.

• What does it take to be a good mystery writer?

• And I don’t understand how The Guardian’s John Mullan can put together a list of the “best femmes fatales” in fiction, but leave off Sherlock Holmes nemesis Irene Adler, Laura Manion of Anatomy of a Murder fame, Naomi Cain from O.G. Benson’s Cain’s Woman, Theresa Fitzgerald from John A. Miller’s Tropical Heat, the lovely, lustful, and larcenous Catwoman, and ... well, this rundown could go on and on, couldn’t it.