That’s a Wrap-up, Everyone

• Earlier this week, National Public Radio brought forth a triple-play of interviews with modern crime writers, its reporters talking to James Lee Burke, Cara Black, and Mark Billingham. Today NPR adds a fourth name to its roster of notables, offering up a “Crime in the City” encounter with British thriller novelist Philip Kerr. During the segment, Kerr leads reporter Eric Westervelt on a tour of Berlin, the setting for several of his Bernie Gunther mysteries, including If the Dead Rise Not, his sixth Gunther adventure, due out in Britain next month and in the States next year. “The fascination for me writing about crime in [early 20th-century] Berlin,” Kerr explains at one point, “was the idea that there was this much bigger crime taking place in the background, a fantastically epochal moment in history which is just going on. ... That just sort of makes the whole thing have a greater resonance.”

• Is it just me, or is there an awful lot being written about 20th-century American pulpmeister Orrie Hitt these days? James Reasoner may have started the ball rolling, but lately a blog called Those Sexy Vintage Sleaze Books has been highlighting Hitt’s greatest hits one after the other. (See here and here.) When is somebody going to create a comprehensive Web site about this author and his distinctive output?

• Are you planning to attend this year’s Shamus Awards banquet, to be held during Bouchercon in Indianapolis? Then you’ll be glad for this information, provided by Robert J. Randisi, founder of the Private Eye Writers of America:

The PWA Shamus Award Banquet will be held Friday, Oct. 16, from 6:30 to 9:00 at The Slippery Noodle, the most popular blues bar in Indianapolis. Good food, great music, and the Shamus Awards. Tickets are $50 and are available now. Reserve your place ASAP as seating is limited. E-mail Bob Randisi at RRandisi@aol.com with your home address and an invitation will be sent to you.

• The Office star Jenna Fisher is looking to develop an NBC-TV series “based on the adventures of [real-life] San Antonio private eye Charlie Parker”? One source describes it as an “hour-long comedy about a lumber salesman who solves a crime and becomes a private eye, along with a ragtag group of pals.” Fisher promises the show will be “like Magnum, P.I. or Columbo in tone.” We shall see.

• Speaking of TV projects, The Guardian reports that the same British production company that gave us the recent Kenneth Branagh series, Wallander, based on Henning Mankell’s best-selling books, “has had scripts commissioned for three Aurelio Zen mysteries, written by the late Michael Dibden [sic], for BBC1 and one Inspector Banks drama, written by Peter Robinson, for ITV1.” (Hat tip to Mystery Fanfare.)

• Happy 110th birthday, Alfred Hitchcock.

• Two more assessments of Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, Inherent Vice--one complimentary (by Michael Dirda of The Washington Post) and one comical (by illustrator Ward Sutton).

• I, for one, remember Richard “R.D.” Rosen’s Harvey Blissberg private eye novels fondly. I’m only sorry they were so few in number.

• Roger Jon “R.J.” Ellory’s first U.S.-published crime thriller, A Quiet Belief in Angels, isn’t due out till early next month. But the author is already making the guest-blogging rounds, explaining today in Jungle Red Writers why he--a British native--has set this novel in the American South.

• And new concept has been born amid the recent angry, frequently incoherent, and regrettably deceptive responses to town-hall meetings about health-care reform: “astroweed lobbying.” More on the subject can be found here.