• On a related note, Elliott Gorn, who teaches history and American Civilization at Brown University and is the author of Dillinger’s Wild Ride: The Year That Made America’s Public Enemy Number One, picks what he thinks are the five best books about criminals for The Wall Street Journal. See all his choices here.
• Matt Beynon Rees, the author so far of three Palestine-based mysteries (including The Samaritan’s Secret), offers up his five favorite novels for a Dutch newspaper.
• John Douglas Marshall explains in The Daily Beast that American author Alan Furst (The Spies of Warsaw) “had it in mind to write a series of novels in a genre he was soon calling ‘historical espionage,’ literary works set in 1930s Europe amid the gathering thunderclouds of fascism and war. But he had no illusions that these novels would be his ticket to fortune or fame. ‘I was going to be the best failed novelist in Paris,’ Furst says. ‘That was certainly not the worst thing in the world that one could be.’” Read more of this story here.
• In a follow-up to yesterday’s obituary of actress Farrah Fawcett, I came across a terrific quote in the TV Confidential blog. Apparently, TV Guide asked Fawcett in 1977 to explain the success of Charlie’s Angels. “When the show was number three,” Fawcett quipped, “I thought it was our acting. When we got to be number one, I decided it could only be because none of us wears a bra.”
• Four more tributes to Fawcett: here, here, here, and here.
• Wow, I never thought I’d see the main title sequence from Jack Palance’s old TV detective series, Bronk, again--yet here it is.
• More forgotten things: The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. books.
• Due to my recent travels, I neglected to mention that David Cole’s series about “cool Canadian crime” has continued in Mystery Fanfare. Catch up with that series here.
• R.I.P., Kodachrome.
• Kevin Burton Smith apparently can’t say enough good things about Ray Banks’ latest novel, Beast of Burden. “[T]his is, hands down, one of the most affecting books I’ve read in a long time,” he writes in his blog.
• Megan Abbott is working on her first graphic novel?
• The eighth and final season of Monk doesn’t even begin on the USA Network until August 7, but star Tony Shalhoub is already getting nostalgic for that series about an obsessive-compulsive detective working the never-clean-enough streets of San Francisco.
He admits, “We all love to work, and we all love to have work, so to step away from something so strong and successful--of course there’s a risk involved.” Still, “I’ve spoken with the writers, and I think we’ve all agreed there’s only so much you can mine out of this character. Nobody wants to move into the area where it starts to feel stale or the quality starts to drop. Since everything does have to come to an end, we want it to happen in the right way, where we’re in control of it, not a situation where the plug gets pulled. I think it honors the audience this way.”(Hat tip to Learning Curve.)
• There’s more Law & Order UK on the way.
• Clea Simon (Probable Claws) is the newest subject of January Magazine’s “Author Snapshot” series. Read more about her here.
• And Booked for Murder has launched a contest to find the “best Ross Macdonald imitations.” Blogger R.T. writes: “Anyone out there with a flair for hard-boiled tropes? I dare you to come up something as good as Macdonald’s description of a woman’s face or his description of the landscape (or maybe he was confusing the woman’s luscious landscape with the lovely view outside the glass wall).” More details here.
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