We Get About

• Get Real, which we thought was the last novel from Donald E. Westlake (who died this last New Year’s Eve), has only just be released by Grand Central Publishing. And now along comes paperback house Hard Case Crime with news that it has in its possession one more never-before-seen Westlake book, Memory, which it intends to bring out next April. Westlake apparently wrote Memory in the 1960s, but it didn’t find a publisher. So he stuck it away, only for his widow to rediscover it this year and pass it along to Lawrence Block, who took it to Hard Case. Sarah Weinman has more on the circuitous route by which Memory will finally reach readers, and the book’s opening chapter can be read here.

• Colin Cotterill, Thailand resident, author of the Dr. Siri Paiboun mystery series (The Merry Misogynist), and recent winner of the Crime Writers’ Association’s Dagger in the Library Award, is interviewed (all too briefly) in the London Times by Barry Forshaw. You can read the results of their exchange here.

• Why Scandinavians write the best crime novels. (Hat tip to Barbara Fister’s Scandinavian Crime Fiction blog.)

• With Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor having recently invoked the fictional girl-detective Nancy Drew as a childhood influence, The New York Times reassesses that character’s influence, almost 80 years since her debut. Among those sharing their memories are Sara Paretsky, Laura Lippman, and Fox News talking head Greta Van Susteran. Read the piece here.

• If you’re interested in submitting crime-related poetry to the third edition of The Lineup, you’d better get to it. The deadline for general submissions is Friday, July 31.

• Horror and dark crime publisher Comet Press is soliciting contributions to a forthcoming but still-untitled “dark crime anthology,” to be published in the late fall of this year. Word length for submissions runs 3,000 to 10,000 words. If you’d like one of your “very violent, gruesome, and disturbing hard-boiled tales” to be considered for publication, get it in by September 1. Click here for full submission details.

• What was the secret of the Mary Celeste, the brigantine merchant ship that was found--abandoned but still in working order--in the Atlantic Ocean in December 1872? Numerous books and articles have been written about this “ghost ship.” The mystery also formed the basis of a 1953 episode of the radio drama series Suspense! Go here to listen to that show, or another episode based on the Mary Celeste, from 1955.

• A sad tale, indeed: “Guillermo Saccomanno has just won the Premio Hammett prize for the best crime novel in Spanish, yet he is almost unknown outside his native Argentina despite writing in a major world language.”

• Lana Wood, who is the younger sister of actress Natalie Wood, and who played Plenty O’Toole in the 1971 film Diamonds Are Forever, will be among the James Bond movie guest stars signing autographs at Comics-Con, which takes place in San Diego, California, from July 23 to 26. More information here.

• Novelist Len Deighton once tried to write a Bond screenplay?

• It’s true: You can live this year’s ThrillerFest all over again.

• “Cindy [Rosmus] is a New York textbook editor by day, a hard-boiled Jersey female by night,” explains the author’s bio note attached to “Kissy-Face,” this week’s short-story offering in Beat to a Pulp. After reading that story, I think Rosmus should let her hard-boiled side come out to play more often.

• There’s a revised online film trailer available for the controversial Christmas release Sherlock Holmes. Watch it here.

• And this is one of the dumbest car-selling schemes ever.