Of Airwaves, Awards, and Airports

First off, I want to thank British thriller writer Tom Cain for allowing The Rap Sheet to syndicate his short story, “Bloodsport,” during the early part of this week. Correspondent Ali Karim alerts me to the fact that “Maxim Jakubowski [has] just selected ‘Bloodsport’ for his annual Best British Crime anthology,” and that the tale has generated a goodly amount of publicity on the Web (see here and here, for instance). I hope the notice will encourage Cain to dispatch his protagonist, Samuel Carver, on more brief adventures.

Now on to other news:

• My fellow Spinetingler Award winner, Peter Rozovsky of Detectives Beyond Borders, was interviewed yesterday on Wisconsin Public Radio’s Here on Earth series. During the segment, Rozovsky says, he was able to “tout Ireland as a hotbed of crime fiction, to offer my definition of noir, and to talk about Yasmina Khadra, Seicho Matsumoto, Henning Mankell, Patricia Highsmith, David Goodis, Ian Rankin, Matt Rees, Ken Bruen’s Jack Taylor, and Jo Nesbø’s Harry Hole. My fellow guest and I both like Jean-Claude Izzo, so we talked about him awhile. (That fellow guest was Hirsh Sawhney, editor of Akashic Books’ Delhi Noir, about which he made some interesting remarks.)” If you failed to tune in to the show’s original broadcast, you can still listen to it here.

• The July/August issue of ThugLit has finally been posted. Included in its contents are stories by Levi Smock (“Life Expectancy”), Joe Clifford (“Red Pistachios”), and Anna Russell (“Let Me Count the Ways, My Dear, Let Me Count the Ways”).

• Tributes continue to roll in for author William G. Tapply (Dark Tiger), who died last week after what I understand was a two-year battle with leukemia. “Anyone lucky enough to meet Bill Tapply (William G. Tapply to library catalogers) knew he was a gentleman and a scholar. To that I would add Fine Human Being,” writes Jeanne Munn Bracken of Writers Plot.

• Will the bloodletting in fiction ever cease?

• In his latest American Eye column for Shots, Michael Carlson joins the chorus of critics on both sides of the Atlantic who lament that U.S. author John Shannon (Palos Verdes Blue) isn’t better known.

• Excellent news here and here.

• When awards are dispensed during next May’s CrimeFest in Bristol, England, expect to see a new third annual commendation added to its existing Last Laugh and Sounds of Crime prizes. “The award will celebrate the best crime e-book of the year, considering titles published for the first time in 2009 ...,” reports TheBookseller.com. “Submission guidelines will be announced at the end of the year, but only titles submitted by the publisher or by a commercially published author are eligible.”

• On his Facebook page, historical crime novelist Matthew Pearl recounts the trials and errors of creating the cover of his first book, The Dante Club (2003). (Hat tip to The Casual Optimist.)

• As critics debate the literary merits of Thomas Pynchon’s new crime novel, Inherent Vice, Entertainment Weekly magazine commissions a forensic artist to show readers how the reclusive author might look today. The illustration is “based on Pynchon’s 1955 high school yearbook photo, one of the last known snapshots of the Gravity’s Rainbow scribe.” See what you think of the results here.

• Meanwhile, Wired magazine has put together a pretty cool interactive map of Thomas Pynchon’s Los Angeles.

• And was the voice-over for the Inherent Vice book trailer provided by Pynchon himself? Inquiring minds want to know ...

• As a prelude to October’s Bouchercon in Indianapolis, Bethany Warner is inviting authors who will be attending that conference to blog at Word Nerd. The initial contributor is Beth Groundwater (To Hell in a Handbasket).

• Finally, does anybody else remember San Francisco International Airport, the 1970-1971 NBC series that starred Lloyd Bridges as the manager of that oft-troubled landing field? It was one part of a “wheel series” called Four-in-One, which also introduced Dennis Weaver’s McCloud and Rod Serling’s Night Gallery. (The fourth component of Four-in-One was The Psychiatrist, starring Roy Thinnes.) I don’t recall San Francisco International Airport well (I was only a kid in 1970), but I do remember that I was sorry when it was cancelled after only six episodes.