Short Shrift

• Following up on recent posts here that addressed the infamous “four play meme challenge,” novelist Max Allan Collins today presents his own list of favorite movies, places he has lived, etc. His selections can be found on his Web site’s front page. By the way, I thought Collins’ rundown of “4 things you want to do before you die” was particularly entertaining:

Get an Edgar
Direct at least five more movies
Complete the Nathan Heller saga
Not die

• More following up: Last week, I wrote about the MyThemes.TV Web site, where you can listen to the theme songs from many old small-screen programs. Subsequently, I’ve discovered one piece of music that was noticeably missing from Mark Little’s expansive collection: the Isaac Hayes number that introduced ABC-TV’s The Men, a Thursday-night “wheel series” from 1972-1973 that featured three crime/espionage shows--Robert Conrad’s Assignment: Vienna, Laurence Luckinbill’s The Delphi Bureau, and Jigsaw, which starred the sadly underappreciated James Wainwright as a missing-persons investigator with the California State Police. Although I remember happily watching The Men when it was first broadcast, I couldn’t have whistled its main theme if you’d asked me to do so just two days ago. However, I just stumbled across that number on a music site called Last.fm. Click here to download the piece. The four-minute work is obviously too long for it all to have been used under the ABC series’ credits, but it will take an expert more knowledgeable than I am to say with part made it onto the air.

• Could Daniel Craig’s James Bond be ready to tangle with an updated Ernst Stavro Blofeld? Permission to Kill weighs the rumors.

• Sam Peckinpah directed a Batman movie? If only it were true …

• And there are several new online interviews worth reading: Jedidiah Ayres talks with Todd Robinson, the creator-editor of ThugLit and the man behind the new short-story collection Sex, Thugs, and Rock & Roll. Lesa Holstine chats with Robert Fate, author of the Baby Shark series, which includes Baby Shark’s Jugglers at the Border, due out in September. (Curiously, there’s yet another exchange with Fate here.) Les Hurst takes on South African writer Deon Meyer (Blood Safari) for Shots. Introducing his latest blog, Coffee with a Canine, Marshal Zeringue of Campaign for the American Reader fame taps Chris Knopf (whose latest Sam Acquillo/Hamptons mystery, Hard Stop, recently reached bookstores) to write about his work … and his Wheaten terrier. And Rap Sheet contributor Declan Burke investigates John Connolly’s demons, while he talks with the Irish wordsmith about his latest thriller, The Lovers, and a young adult novel Connolly has planned that “involves Satanism and quantum physics.”