A Mixed Bag

• Crimespree Magazine editor Jon Jordan screens the UK and U.S. versions of the time-travel TV detective drama Life on Mars, released recently in the States, and declares himself pleased with both--though for different reasons.

• To celebrate the publication of their second issue, editors of The Lineup: Poems on Crime and some of their contributors have scheduled a reading at New York City’s KGB Bar on Thursday, October 22, from 7 to 9 p.m. More details here.

• If you enjoyed Otto Penzler’s great smorgasbord of guns-and-gams fiction, The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps (2007), and have been looking around ever since for something else to ... well, sink your teeth into, then you might consider his new follow-up, The Vampire Archives: The Most Complete Volume of Vampire Tales Ever Published, an ideal accompaniment to the coming Halloween. Within this volume’s 1,056 pages you’ll find pre- and post-Dracula yarns by Edgar Allan Poe, Sheridan Le Fanu, H.P. Lovecraft, Dan Simmons, Anne Rice, Ed Gorman, Roger Zelanzy, and many more. “To me,” writes Rod Lott in Bookgasm, “the mix is a nice balance between revisiting classics; catching up on stories I’ve always heard about, but never read; and being exposed to new ones. I’ll be working on this one through the New Year. It’s probably best that way--if you tried to read this cover to cover without some breaks for other books in between, your blood sugar would go wonky.”

• This is the dumbest idea I’ve heard in a long time. More here.

• Max Allan Collins and his tech-savvy son, Nathan, have been tinkering with the author’s Web site, F.O.M.A.C. (aka Friends of Max Allan Collins). Its been transformed into a friendlier hybrid of blog and conventional Web site, with the author penning weekly updates (posted on Monday nights), but also plenty of back-matter about his books, movies, and musical ventures. (Nathan explains it all better than I can here.) This week, Collins Sr. updates his fans on the DVD release of The Last Lullaby, a fine film based on his short story “A Matter of Principal,” and the debut later this month of his new Hard Case Crime novel, Quarry in the Middle.

• How would Louise Penny cast a movie adapted from her latest Chief Inspector Armand Gamache novel, The Brutal Telling? She tells all in Marshal Zeringue’s My Book, the Movie blog. “[S]uddenly, unexpectedly while watching a film I found my Gamache,” the author enthuses. “I wasn't looking--but there on the screen he was. It was while watching this wonderful, fairly modest British film called Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day. It stars Amy Adams and Frances McDormand, as Miss Pettigrew, a middle-aged British nanny in the late 1930s, who finds herself taken on by a giddy American singer. It’s hilarious, and wonderful. There’s a character named Joe. And I suddenly realized Joe was Gamache, in slightly different circumstances. The same warmth, dignity, humour but with a touch of sadness.” So who’s the performer who caught Penny’s eye? You’ll have to go here to find out.

• Off-topic but still interesting: Warner Bros. today releases DVD versions of two Gene Roddenberry TV pilot films, both produced in the 1970s and having to do with a NASA scientist who returns to a radically changed Earth after being in suspended animation for 150 years. I remember these projects fondly, and was disappointed at the time that neither was picked up as a series. More here.

• Expect changes in the fees associated with submissions to the UK Crime Writers’ Association’s annual Dagger Awards competition.

• While I couldn’t really care less whether health-care reform in this country is passed overwhelmingly by Democrats, or with some begrudging Republican acceptance that Americans require this sort of help, it’s still good to see that GOPers are peeling off in favor of President Obama’s top domestic priority.

• And the latest edition of Clues: A Journal of Detection has just been published. Managing editor Elizabeth Foxwell reports that this themed issue about lesbian crime fiction includes work on “American author Katherine V. Forrest, British author Stella Duffy, French author Maud Tabachnik, German author Thea Dorn ... and Spanish author Isabel Franc.” Click here for the table of contents.