Bullet Points: Pre-Daggers Edition

• Smoking isn’t often celebrated these days (with good reason), but The Guardian has posted a new list of “10 of the best smokes” to be found in fiction. It includes references to Sherlock Holmes and Raymond Chandler’s detective stories. “Everyone seems to smoke in Chandler’s novels, women often with particular panache,” the paper observes. “Philip Marlowe himself smokes with a kind of world-weary soulfulness, as when confronted by a sudden revelation in The Big Sleep. ‘I sat there and poisoned myself with cigarette smoke and listened to the rain and thought about it.’” (Hat tip to Campaign for the American Reader.)

• For those keeping track, tonight will bring an announcement in London of the first 2009 Dagger Award winners. We’ll bring you the news when we receive it. Meanwhile, here’s the list of nominees.

• A few hours from now, we’ll post a piece about tonight’s second-season debut of Leverage, the Timothy Hutton-led TNT-TV drama about crime-solving thieves. Meanwhile, here’s a quick reminder that tonight will also bring the premiere of TNT’s Dark Blue, a Jerry Bruckheimer series about undercover police officers in Los Angeles. Dylan McDermott (formerly of The Practice) stars. The show begins at 10 p.m. ET/PT. You’ll find a preview video here.

• How many readers remember O’Hara, United States Treasury?

• Pulp Serenade blogger Cullen Gallagher writes to say that “I recently found a mega depressing article by William Campbell Gault written for Writer’s Digest back in 1956, which I wrote about on my blog. Sort of a brief memoir, he goes through his career in the odd ‘second-person’ style, always referring to ‘you.’ I haven’t seen it reprinted before, so I excerpted the last few paragraphs for people to read. They’re the most positive words he has to offer--I didn’t want to depress people too much!” You’ll find that excerpt here.

• Another Stephen King novel will be made into a mini-series.

• From Elizabeth Foxwell’s The Bunburyist: “This week BBC Radio 7 features Cornell Woolrich’s ‘It Had to Be Murder,’ the short story that was the basis for Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. Go here for the schedule or to listen.” The program will remain available for listening for the next seven days.

• One more New Orleans mystery novel? Mary Anna Evans promises something new in Floodgates, the premiere of an archaeologist-detective series that is being released this month by Poisoned Pen Press.

• The Wall Street Journal’s Elliott Gorn has posted a list of what he believes are the five best true-crime books. Although I’m not usually a true-crime reader, I am pleased to say that I have on my shelves three of the titles he mentions. Who knew?

• Registration is now open for this year’s Murder and Mayhem in Muskego (Wisconsin). The convention will be held on November 14. A list of writers signed up to participate can be found here.

• Are you an Internet addict? Be glad you’re not a Chinese child.

• And The Rap Sheet ends its run. No, I am not talking about the blog you’re currently reading, but instead one of several like-named Web products, this one a sports column for Alabama’s Birmingham News, written by Ian R. Rapaport.