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 you’ve been living under a moonrock and don’t 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.)