Bullet Points: Monday Mystery Tour Edition

• Two years ago, when The Rap Sheet asked more than 100 crime novelists, book critics, and bloggers from all over the English-speaking world to choose the one crime/mystery/thriller novel that they thought had been “most unjustly overlooked, criminally forgotten, or underappreciated over the years,” George Pelecanos selected Hard Rain Falling (1966), by Don Carpenter. He called it “a stunning, brutally honest entry in the social realist school of crime fiction.” Now, after many years out of print, Carpenter’s book is available from NYRB Classics--with an introduction by Pelecanos. NYRB editor Edwin Frank talks with the Washington City Paper about his decision to reissue Hard Rain Falling. (Hat tip to Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind.)

• Good news for Mannix fans: The third season of that 1967-1975 private-eye drama, starring Mike Connors, is due out in DVD format on October 27. Having already worked my way through Seasons 1 and 2--and finding the show to have worn well over the decades--you can bet I have my Netflix request in for this new release.

• While we’re on the subject of DVDs, you should note that the first four (of eight) Rockford Files teleflicks--broadcast on CBS-TV between 1994 and 1999--will be released as a package on November 3. I was never as fond of the Rockford films as I was of the original 1974-1980 series. However, pretty much anything with James Garner in it is a cut above the norm. So count me in for a re-watch.

• A terrific retrospective on Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles.

• And a related note: Tonight will see the debut on PBS-TV of what looks like a fascinating two-hour documentary called Inventing L.A.: The Chandlers and Their Times. The Chandler of this title isn’t Raymond, but is instead the Chandler family that for nearly 100 years controlled the Los Angeles Times--a newspaper from which the author discovered so much about his adopted Southern California home. “Anyone interested in Los Angeles is by definition interested in the Chandlers,” writes Times TV critic Robert Lloyd, “since the way the city looks and works, and doesn’t work, was formed in no small part by the family’s own myth-making, empire-building agenda, the main instrument of which was the Times itself. From San Pedro harbor to the Hollywood sign to the houses of the San Fernando Valley, their prints are all over this place.” There’s still more on this documentary here. Check your local listings for broadcast times.

• Another new Webzine--and it’s looking for submissions!

• Another multipart post: Uriah Robinson (aka Norman Price) has put up the first two segments of his recent interview with British crime novelist Philip Kerr, author of the quite extraordinary new novel, If the Dead Rise Not. At one point in their exchange, Robinson asks what inspired March Violets (1989), Kerr’s first Bernie Gunther detective story, and whether he created Gunther as “a tough guy to appeal to women readers.” The author responds: “The original inspiration was not Raymond Chandler, as a lot of people think, but Gorky Park [by Martin Cruz Smith]. And I made Bernie a tough guy to appeal to myself. But I’m from a pretty tough part of Edinburgh and I am told I can be quite threatening. The window cleaner is terrified of me. I speak nicely, with received pronunciation but that’s just to hide the Easterhouse thug I really am. Underneath my smooth exterior I am really a gangster. I think I would have made a very good gangster, quite frankly. Teddy Bass? Don Logan? I could shit them both.” Part I of their discussion can be found here. Part II is here, and there’s still more to come.

• Have you seen the new trailer for director Martin Scorsese’s forthcoming film, Shutter Island, based on Dennis Lehane’s 2003 novel of the same name? It looks frightening enough that I’m not sure I can convince my wife to sit through it on a big screen.

• Pennsylvanian Barbara J. Mitchell won one of the three copies of Even Money, by Dick and Felix Francis, that The Rap Sheet gave away recently. She wrote me last week to say that she’d finished reading the book and had reviewed it--favorably I should mention--in her own blog, Views from the Countryside. Way to go, Barbara.

• Bad planning by the Dalton Gang.

• If you’re in San Francisco next week for the Litquake literature festival, you might want to attend this event on Thursday, October 15: “Subterranean SF: Hard-boiled Writing with an Edge,” described as “an evening of darkly inspired readings exposing San Francisco’s sinister underbelly. Join a hard-hitting roster of literary and crime fiction masters as they delve into the shadowy realms of mayhem, murder, and much, much more.” Hosted by Peter Maravelis, the event will feature readings by Robert Mailer Anderson, Cara Black, Craig Clevenger, David Corbett, Don Herron, and Peter Plate. It all gets started at 7 p.m., with a venue still to be decided. The Litquake schedule is available here.

• I want to wish Scottsdale, Arizona’s Poisoned Pen bookstore, and its owner, Barbara Peters (as well as her husband, Robert Rosenwald), a happy 20th anniversary. (Hat tip to B.V. Lawson’s In Reference to Murder.)

• I talked with Hard Case Crime editor Charles Ardai not long ago for one of my other blogs, Killer Covers. But now North Carolina’s News & Record newspaper offers a multi-part audio interview with Ardai, in which he recalls his introduction to adventure films and how the Indiana Jones series influenced creation of HCC’s new sister line, The Adventures of Gabriel Hunt. Listen to the interview here.

• And while you’re in a listening mood, check out a full episode from the post-World War II radio drama series, The Adventures of Sam Spade. For his blog, Evan Lewis has chopped into four parts a June 8, 1947, episode called “The Calcutta Trunk Caper,” starring the gruff-voiced Howard Duff. The full ep runs about 25 minutes.

• An Erle Stanley Gardner Weekend? Get ready, Temecula, California. “In honor of Erle Stanley Gardner Mystery Weekend,” reports the newspaper in nearby Fallbrook, “the California Chamber Orchestra will entertain its November 7 audience with classical favorites and a completely new composition written especially for the occasion. The weekend, which honors the famous mystery author--best known for writing the Perry Mason novels, spawning the Perry Mason TV show--will also offer aspiring writers of all ages the opportunity to participate in a mystery-writing contest and attend writers’ conferences, all designed to help understand the mystery genre.” (Another hat tip to In Reference to Murder.)

• Mike Knowles applied Jeff Foxworthy’s humor to Mickey Spillane and came up with an entertaining list of scenarios entitled “You Might Be in a Spillane Novel If ...”

• Who remembers the theme from the first Columbo pilot film, “Prescription: Murder” (1968), composed by Dave Grusin?

• Someday, perhaps the 1968-1969 CBS-TV series The Outsider, created by Roy Huggins and starring Darren McGavin, will be released in DVD format. And maybe in the meantime someone can dig up the footage cut from that series to purge it of violence in the aftermath of presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination.

• Northern Ireland’s Sam Millar (The Dark Place) is Crime Squad’s October “Author of the Month.”

• Steven Steinbock tracks down Jacques Futrelle, the early 20th-century creator of “The Thinking Machine,” fictional detective Professor Augustus S.F.X. Van Dusen. It’s not a new piece, but a good one nonetheless.

• The only film of World War II teenage diarist Anne Frank?

• You tell ’em, Paul Krugman!

• “With all of the remakes going on in Hollywood these days,” opines Marty McKee in Johnny LaRue’s Crane Shot, “I truly cannot believe nobody is considering doing a new version of The Fall Guy. Not only was a hit during the 1980s and well remembered today by those viewers who helped make it one, but it also has a fantastic premise.” And it featured the curvaceous Heather Thomas in a leading (and oft-under-dressed) role.

• And you have only nine days left if you want to enter Jim Winter’s big Road Rules book giveaway contest. Here are the rules.