Notes from All Over

• There’s good news from New Pulp Press editor Jon Bassoff (aka Nate Flexer, author of The Disassembled Man). As reported by Brian Lindenmuth of BSC Review (formerly BookSpot Central), New Pulp Press will begin reissuing pulp-fiction classics. Bassoff recently wrote to subscribers to the Rara-Avis online discussion group:

There seems to be quite a Gil Brewer revival, similar to the one Jim Thompson enjoyed in the ’80’s and ’90s. New Pulp Press will be reissuing two of his novels later this year and early next: Flight to Darkness and The Red Scarf. If you haven’t read Brewer, do yourself a favor and pick up a couple of his novels. They can be hit and miss because of the feverish speed that he wrote, but he deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Jim Thompson/James M. Cain.

• Are you hoping to attend this year’s Private Eye Writers of America banquet at Bouchercon? PWA founder Robert J. Randisi advises that you “keep the night of Friday, October 16th, open, from 6:30 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Invitations will go out to PWA members in August. After the membership is given the opportunity to respond, the event will be open to the public.” For further info, check back with the PWA News and Views blog or the Bouchercon 2009 Web site.

• We’re now a month past the announcement of this year’s International Dagger Award nominees, and just a week away from news about the winner. In the interim, Petrona blogger Maxine Clarke has posted a quite insightful analysis of all the contestants. Her early pick was Shadow, by Karin Alvtegen (translated by McKinley Burnett), the only non-series title of the bunch. However, Clarke writes that all six nominees “are worthy winners. None of these books is noticeably ‘better’ than the others. All these books have a heart, and speak for those who don’t usually have a voice: children, women, the poor, the bereaved, the old, the forgotten.”

• The world’s first virtual mystery convention? That’s what Poisoned Pen Press and Scottsdale, Arizona’s popular Poisoned Pen mystery bookstore have planned for October 24 of this year. As Mystery Fanfare’s Janet Rudolph explains, this PP Web Con will invite “top mystery and crime writers from all over the world [to] meet and mix with readers and others online in a virtual convention center.” The convention will offer “a variety of live events and ‘on demand’ recordings. These will be video-, audio-, and text-based individual presentations by, and featuring, mystery and crime authors from all over the world.” According to its registration page, $25 USD will get you in the “doors,” and give you “a $20 book voucher, a Goodie Bag (with e-books, of course), and more.” Alaskan writer Dana Stabenow has been named as the Guest of Honor, with the rather-too-ubiquitous Lee Child serving as International Guest of Honor. PP Web Con officials promise to begin blogging about all of these arrangements, but so far their blog is empty. For more information about PP Web Con, click here.

• Stupidest quote of the day. Maybe of the whole week.

• Co-authors Rosemary and Larry Mild talk with In Reference to Murder’s B.V. Lawson about their new Maryland-backdropped mystery novel, Boston Scream Pie.

• For The Financial Times newspaper, Adrian Turpin, the director of Britain’s bi-annual Wigtown Book Festival, evaluates the unlikely success of Alexander McCall Smith and why it is that the mystery-fiction formulas he created work so well not only for him, but for his imitators. Read Turpin’s piece here.