Of Remakes, Rules, and Radio Drama

• The timing of this announcement is quite remarkable: Yesterday marked 30 years since the last original episode of The Rockford Files was aired on NBC-TV. Today, The Hollywood Reporter brings news that the same network has “greenlighted” six drama pilots for next fall, including House creator David Shore’s updated version of Rockford. When, oh when, will overpaid TV execs stop trying to capitalize on viewers’ fond memories of classic programs (whether it be Kolchak: The Night Stalker, The Bionic Woman, or now Rockford) by trying to remake them--usually with poor results? Instead, they ought to start coming up with some new ideas. Or is that simply too much to ask? (Hat tip to Crimespree Cinema.)

• The annual Noir City film festival is all set to kick off in San Francisco on January 22 and in Seattle on February 19. Vince Keenan has the promo video online.

• Author, blogger, and Rap Sheet contributor Jim Winter has posted the concluding chapter of his online crime novel, Road Rules. You can read the whole work here.

• Is this finally the last “Best Crime Fiction of 2009” piece to be published? The list-obsessed site, Flashlight Worthy Book Recommendations, asked a number of crime-fiction bloggers--including Cullen Gallagher, Nathan Cain, Sarah Weinman, and yours truly--to pick their favorite entries in the genre from last year. The results were just posted this morning. My own selection: Philip Kerr’s If the Dead Rise Not, a British title that will be published in the States in mid-March. UPDATE: Mystery Fanfare’s Janet Rudolph asks Flashlight Worthy editor Peter Steinberg a few questions about his site.

• And I’m adding Flashlight Worthy’s mystery fiction page to The Rap Sheet’s ever-evolving right-hand column of links.

• I don’t think I’ve heard about this before:

Producer William Dozier struck gold for ABC with Batman in January of 1966 and hoped to repeat his success with The Green Hornet during the 1966-1967 season. During the summer of 1966, Dozier began work on another potential series, this one based on Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy comic strip. A pilot film was produced and NBC considered picking up the series as a midseason replacement during the 1966-1967 season and then later as a fall entry for the 1967-1968 season. But the failure of The Green Hornet and declining ratings for Batman kept Dick Tracy from selling.

More information can be found here.

• Alaska writer (and wine salesman) Thomas Faughnan supplies this week’s short-story offering in Beat to a Pulp. His yarn is called “Twelve-gauge Ticket to Hell.”

• Another week, another Sam Spade radio adventure at Davy Crockett’s Almanack. The episode (from June 20, 1948) is titled “The Death Bed Caper.”

• My review of Leighton Gage’s third Mario Silva novel, Dying Gasp, appears today in January Magazine.

• Art Clokey, who invented Gumby, “the slender, green clay character partly modeled after Clokey’s father,” died on Friday in Los Osos, California. He was 89 years old. No reaction yet from either Gumby or his sidekick, Pokey.

• The first rough trailer for director Joe Carnahan’s cinematic remake of the 1983-1987 NBC-TV series The A-Team is being spread around the Web. You can watch it here. It borrows respectfully from the series’ original opening, which is here.

• By the way, a fan-made trailer--with a slightly different, but definitely interesting cast--is here.

• Maybe we’re not living through “a golden age for Irish writing,” after all. John Spain explains in the Irish Independent. (Hat tip to Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind.)

• Soho Press co-founder Laura Hruska has died “after a long illness.” A memorial service is to be held on Friday in New York. (The New York Times has more on Hruska.)

• I know this wasn’t a great film, but I remember it--and the 1974 Alistair MacLean novel on which it was based--mostly fondly.

• The Winter 2009/2010 issue of Mysterical-E has been posted. Contents include Jim Doherty’s essay about “The Life & Legend of Inspector Harry Callahan,” the San Francisco homicide cop Clint Eastwood played in the Dirty Harry movies.

• In the latest installment of its “Partners in Crime” series, Mystery Fanfare hosts Stanley Trollip, who with fellow Africa native Michael Sears writes the Detective Kubu mysteries (A Carrion Death, The Second Death of Goodluck Tinubu).

• Screenwriter and teacher Lou Berney submits his first novel, Gutshot Straight, to the Page 69 Test. Results are here.

• Is Richmond, Virginia, preparing to challenge Philadelphia’s claim to the literary legacy of Edgar Allan Poe? It seems so.

• Dennis Lehane’s 2003 thriller, Shutter Island, has already been adapted as a big-screen film, due out soon from director Martin Scorcese. But now the story has also been turned into a graphic novel by French artist Christian De Metter. (Hat tip to Existentialist Man.)

• Versatile mystery author Walter Mosley has a play opening this month in Cincinnati, Ohio. It’s based on his 2008 “novel-in-stories,” The Tempest Tales.

• Finally, the third edition of The Lineup: Poems on Crime is scheduled to go on sale “at Lulu.com, Amazon.com, and independent booksellers” on April 1. But through March 15, co-editor Gerald So is offering “pre-ordered” copies of this poetry anthology at a discount off the mailing price. Click here for more details.