Of Fests, Films, and Fools

• England’s Harrogate Crime Writing Festival begins today. As The Guardian explains, “Novelist Mark Billingham opens the event and is joined over the weekend by Barry Norman, Reginald Hill, and Stella Duffy. Saving perhaps the best until last, the event closes on Sunday with The Wire creator David Simon teaming up with novelist George Pelecanos, who is also one of the show’s writers, for a discussion about the series with Laura Lippman.” Tonight, as part of the Harrogate festivities, the winner of the 2009 Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award will be announced. The shortlist of nominees can be found here.

• Talk about important days! As The Writer’s Almanac reminds us,

It’s the birthday of crime novelist Raymond Chandler, ... born in Chicago, Illinois (1888). He’s known for his novels about the private detective Philip Marlowe, such as The Big Sleep (1939) and The Long Goodbye (1954). He’s one of the originators of hard-boiled detective fiction, and he’s known more for the style and atmosphere of his novels than his plots.

He said, “The things [my readers] remembered, that haunted them, were not for example that a man got killed, but that in the moment of his death he was trying to pick a paper clip up off the polished surface of a desk, and it kept slipping away from him, so that there was a look of strain on his face and his mouth was half open in a kind of tormented grin, and the last thing in the world he thought about was death.”

B.V. Lawson has more background on Chandler here, including mention of two Raymond Chandler tours of Los Angeles taking place later this year. And of course, much more about Philip Marlowe’s creator can be found in The Rap Sheet’s back files.

• As much as I enjoyed the previous trailer for Whiteout, the forthcoming movie starring the captivating Kate Beckinsale and based on Greg Rucka’s much-praised graphic novel Whiteout (1998), I like this new one even better.

• Rap Sheet contributor Ali Karim talked last year with spy novelist Charles Cumming. Now, Wesley Britton of The Spy Wise Blog questions the author again. Could even James Bond have held up under such persistent interrogation?

• This seems to me like an underhanded promotions scheme.

• Although I have yet to actually see a copy of Tower, the new paperback novel about friendship, fate, and treachery written by Ken Bruen and Reed Farrel Coleman, Pulp Serenade’s Cullen Gallagher has not only read the book, but extols its use of language and rich narrative in a new review.

• For the e-zine Pulp Pusher, Danny Hogan interviews Warren Roberts about his new, Florida-set novel, Kill City USA. I hadn’t heard of this private eye Joe Milo novel before, but it sounds like a most entertaining summer diversion.

• In a fairly good-sized interview, Megan Abbott talks with the Barnes & Noble Review about her sad but seductive new historical noir novel, Bury Me Deep.

• Janet Evanovich will publish her next Alexandra “Alex” Barnaby (aka Metro Girl) novel as a comic book. Is nothing sacred any longer?

• This is for fans of historical true-crime. (Hat tip to Bill Crider.)

• “Don’t call me Angel. I loathe it.” That’s a quote from the latest film in focus at Noir of the Week: Crime of Passion (1957), starring Barbara Stanwyck and Sterling Hayden.

• Richard Lange submits his new novel, This Wicked World, to the notorious Page 69 Test.

• If only the clocks could be turned back ...

• And I don’t know about John Stewart being “America’s most-trusted newsman” in our post-Walter Cronkite world, but he sure can be funny. And sometimes more honest because of it. Particularly priceless was his put-down yesterday of the idiotic Birthers--you know, those conspiracy theorists who perpetuate the odd myth that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States, and therefore cannot be president. Click here to watch the video. (More on the Looney Tunes Birthers here and here.)