Friday, December 04, 2009

Taking in the Views

Tre Sekunder (Three Seconds) by Anders Roslund and Borge Hellström has won the 2009 Best Swedish Crime Novel Award. Meanwhile, Andrew Taylor’s excellent Bleeding Heart Square picked up the Martin Beck Award for translated fiction.

• The November/December issue of ThugLit is now available online, with contributions from Ryan Zimmerman, Taylor Brown, Scott Wolven, and David Keaton.

A last-minute warning, just in case youve been living under a moonrock and dont know this already: The concluding episode of Tony Shalhoub’s eight-year-old TV series, Monk, will air tonight at 9 p.m. ET/PT on the USA Network. UPDATE: More on the Monk finale can be found in The Huffington Post.

• Sarah Weinman has announced her favorite crime novels of 2009.

• No wonder the original theme for Lee Majors’ The Six Million Dollar Man was dropped when ABC-TV picked it up as a series. Yuck!

Matt Houston on DVD?

• There are still three weeks left before Christmas, but already Mystery Readers Journal editor Janet Rudolph is talking about crime fiction appropriate to the holiday.

• Australian writer Joanna Challis, whose first Daphne du Maurier mystery, Murder on the Cliffs, was just released, seems to be making the blogging rounds. She’s been interviewed not only by In Reference to Murder’s B.V. Lawson but also by Lesa Holstine of Lesa’s Book Critiques. And she has contributed a guest post about the background of her new series to the Euro Crime blog.

• I’ve never even heard of “butt makeup” before.

• Keith Rawson and Cameron Ashley will launch a new crime-fiction e-zine in January, inspired by the defunct Australian print magazine Crime Factory.

• Novelist Mark Billingham is among the celebrities Britain’s Daily Telegraph has coerced into talking about their investment strategies. You can read more here.

• I, too, have fond memories of this CBS-TV holiday promo.

• I feel ashamed--deeply ashamed--by the fact that I’ve not read a single volume mentioned on The New York Times’ “10 Best Books of 2009” list. And I have only read a handful of the paper’s “100 Notable Books of 2009.” Surely, this means I shall be banished to some remote island with only a toothbrush and a towering stack of books to be consumed post haste. Oh, goody ...

• Did you know that New York author S.J. Rozan has a new book of Lydia Chin short stories out from Crippen & Landru? It’s called A Tale About a Tiger and Other Mysterious Events, and would make a fine Christmas gift for yours truly. Just in case anyone in my family happens to be reading this note ...

• By the way, if you haven’t noticed, Rozan has relaunched her (very) short fiction Web site, Six Stories, and is looking for more submissions. Anyone up for the challenge?

What lengths new crime novelists must go to these days.

• Early, black-and-white episodes of the UK spy series Callan, starring Edward Woodward, are due out on DVD in February 2010.

• I rather imposed myself on author John Lutz at Bouchercon last year, interrupting a conversation he was having with his wife at the bar in order to tell him how much I appreciated his Fred Carver private eye series (Tropical Heat, Scorcher, etc.). It felt good to do, though, and he seemed ultimately not to mind the intrusion. I was reminded of our conversation today, when I saw the mention, in Marshal Zeringue’s Writers Read blog, of the two books Lutz has been reading lately. Both terrific picks.

• Can we expect an explosion of Chinese crime fiction?

• The TV series Leverage is due to return to TNT next month.

• And this is interesting: Lawyer-turned-crime novelist Erle Stanley Gardner once carried on a correspondence with “Nathan Leopold, who along with Richard Loeb was convicted for senselessly killing a 14-year-old boy in 1924.” (Hat tip to Elizabeth Foxwell.)

1 comment:

Unknown said...

A note to the Publisher:
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BUT WAIT!
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San Francisco, CA
Pedophiles In Love With Single Moms. Can It Be?
Pedophiles are learning to love single moms. Why? because thousands of single moms are inadvertently creating happy hunting grounds for that subspecies of pedophiles who like their prey young – really young.
“Think of it” says Crystal the Jacquez, managing editor of Guys That Lie.com, the online back grounding site. “If you’re one of the tens of thousands of pedophiles with a taste for really young kids, how do you get to them? Children under five or six are just too young to be online by themselves.”
“So what does this most dangerous form of pedophiles do?” asks Jacquez, “He surfs social networking sites looking for the pages of proud single mothers just aching to show potential dates how beautiful their children are and just hoping to attract men who will not only will love them, but will love their children too.
Well, the single moms who put photos of their pre-school kids on their social networking homepages are certainly attracting at least one type of child-loving guy – pedophiles”
Here’s an excerpt from a report in the journal American Psychologist, published by the American Psychological Association, regarding pedophiles stalking pre-schoolers on the internet:
“Finding prepubescent victims directly (on the Internet) is quite rare; such offenders use the Internet in other ways. Pedophiles typically get access to preschool victims through online contact with parents”
“If you have pictures of your child on line,” says Jacquez, “don’t be too surprised to get a message like the following from some nice sounding guy”:
“Hey! I just saw your profile on Facebook and you are one great looking lady --- and that little girl of yours is just marvelous looking! She looks so bright etc. etc. etc!”
“You’re going to have a new best friend very soon,” she says. “Count on it!”
Jacquez cites the following statistic from: Offender Characteristics, U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics re. Victim-offender relationships in sexual assault regarding who sexually assaults children under 6 years old.
Who assaults children under 6 years old:
Trusted family members: 48.6%
Strangers: 3.1%
Trusted family acquaintances: 48.3%
“If a pedophile targets your child’s photo on your homepage, trust us,” says Jacquez, “they’ll become a ‘trusted family acquaintance’ soon enough. “
“One thing more thing,” says Jacquez, “when you meet a new guy online, check him out immediately with us at Guys That Lie.com (www.guysthatlie.com). Our site is free and was built in order to empower women to check out the backgrounds of guys that they meet online.
“First, check him out in our Child Molesters Section, then in our Criminal Records Section. After that, check out all his other claims about his background. There is no way,” she says, “that you can be too careful.”
Guys and Lies also has a special page on Facebook at www.facebook.com/guysthatlie and on MySpace at www.myspace.com/guysthatlie.
Jacquez asks you to please forward this article to single moms you know who have their kid’s photos online..
Contact:
crystal Jacquez, managing editor
Guys That Lie.com
415 678-8610
crystal01@guysthatlie.com
http://www.guysthatlie.com