Bullet Points: Lazy Sunday Edition

• Nathan Cain of Independent Crime has posted the trailer for the upcoming film The Killer Inside Me, based on Jim Thompson’s 1952 novel of the same name. It’s a depressing, violent taste of the finished picture (no such bad things should ever happen to the lovely Jessica Alba), but Cain notes that it all comes “straight from the novel”--no need to “tart up Thompson’s book with titillating and shocking detail.” This film is due out sometime in 2010.

• I’ve been thinking lately about Christmas presents, so Bookgasm’s round-up of sexy book covers--with its inclusion of the front from Miranda Forbes’ Seriously Sexy Stocking Filler (left)--inevitably caught my eye.

• With the 2009 holiday season fast approaching, I can guarantee that there will be lots of recommendations being made of appropriately themed crime novels. Blogger Les Blatt has already posted one list of Thanksgiving-related mysteries, and points me to an extensive compilation of Christmas crime stories prepared by the Cincinnati bookshop Grave Matters.

• Ohio writer Fred Snyder provides this week’s short-story offering at Beat to a Pulp. His provocatively titled tale is “Conjugal.”

• Derringer Awar-winning author and blogger Patti Abbott recounts the history of her successful “Friday forgotten books” series in a guest post at Meanderings and Muses.

• Happy birthday to actor Ed Asner. The star of Lou Grant and co-star of The Mary Tyler Moore Show turns 80 years old today.

• What are Ian Rankin’s six favorite books? Click here to find out.

• Rudy Giuliani doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

• Brat Packer Bret Easton Ellis (Less Than Zero, American Psycho) is going to pen an HBO-TV series based on Jason Starr’s 2007 novel, The Follower? Starr seems content with that idea, at least. Maybe better than content. As he told the e-zine Hard Feelings in August, “I think, with [Ellis’] themes, subject matter and style, he’s had a tremendous influence, not only on my writing, but on a whole generation of writers. I think we will look back and see he influenced his generation the way Hemingway and Stein influenced theirs.”

• UK author Craig Russell talks with Shots’ Ayo Onatade about both his detective Jan Fabel series (set in Hamburg, Germany) and Lennox, his latest novel, a private-eye adventure set in 1950s Glasgow. Their whole exchange is here.

• Is nothing new in Hollywood anymore? Now there’s talk of ABC-TV remaking Charlie’s Angels for the 21st century. Yawn ...

• Author Max Allan Collins says that he’s writing a graphic novel finale to his Perdition saga.

• And while I don’t remember Tales of the Gold Monkey all that well, I do recall that the ABC series (which starred Stephen Collins as a trouble-attracting pilot working the South Pacific trade routes in 1938) was rather fun, escapist fare. So it’s good to hear that the single-season show is bound for the DVD market next spring.