Bullet Points: Mid-Olympics Edition

• It’s been just shy of a year since The Rap Sheet racked up its 500,000th page view. But sometime early Friday morning, that little red counter at the bottom of the right-hand column did one better, registering this blog’s 750,000th page view.

• Following the news that Aftermath, Peter Robinson’s 2001 suspense novel starring Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks, is going to be adapted for British television, Gary Dobbs talks with the author about the Banks books, his lack of involvement in the two-part TV drama, and his next novel, Bad Boy (due out in August).

• Meanwhile, it appears that the late Michael Dibdin’s protagonist, Italian cop Aurelio Zen, is also headed for the small screen.

• The guest of honor at the 2010 Killer Nashville conference, August 20-22, will be Jeffery Deaver, author of the forthcoming Lincoln Rhyme novel, The Burning Wire.

• Journalist-novelist Matt Beynon Rees (who recently wrote on this page about Georges Simenon’s The Saint-Fiacre Affair) has some casting suggestions for anybody who might like to adapt his new book, The Fourth Assassin, for the big-screen. Musing at My Book, the Movie, he says that the role of his Palestinian detective, Omar Yussef, should go to none other than Tony Shalhoub of Monk fame.

• New in Beat to a Pulp: “Coercion,” by Mark Boss.

• Another excellent tribute to the late Robert B. Parker, this one coming from fellow author Tim Byrd. (Hat tip to Bill Crider.)

• Oh, yeah, this couldn’t possibly lead to trouble, right?

• Seattle’s fourth annual Noir City film festival began last night and runs through this coming Thursday. Here’s the schedule of events. And Vince Keenan promises thoughtful coverage.

• Hard Case Crime editor Charles Ardai tells Stephen D. Rogers that he’s currently “working on the new TV series Haven for SyFy in a writing and producing capacity.” Haven is apparently based on the novella The Colorado Kid, by Stephen King, which Hard Case published back in 2005.

• Craig McDonald’s first Hector Lassiter novel, Head Games (2007), is to be reinterpretated as a graphic novel, due out in 2011.

• With this 1960 paperback book cover being such a stunner, I’m sorry to hear that the story inside isn’t better at grabbing the reader’s attention.

• Most of the news we’ve heard lately about President Barack Obama’s 2009 economic stimulus campaign has had to do with Republican’t hyocrisy on the issue. But it seems the bigger story is how successful those Democratic-led efforts have been. More on that here, here, here, and here.

• Short-story writer Paul D. Brazill has recently embarked on a succession of interviews with people involved in the crime-fiction community. Here he talks with Maxim Jakubowski, British publisher and former bookstore proprietor; and here he chats up Aldo Calcagno, veteran Web fiction editor.

• Thrillers, Killers ’n’ Chillers, the year-old Webzine co-edited by Col Bury and Matt Hilton, recently won the Preditors & Editors Readers Poll for Fiction Magazines.

• Today brings much-anticipated release of Barnaby Jones: Season One on DVD. I was never a Barnaby Jones fan, but it’s been so long since that Buddy Ebsen detective drama went off the air--30 years ago this coming April 3--that I might just have to sample the show again, to see what it was I liked (and didn’t like) about it.

• The challenges of interviewing James Ellroy.

• Jim Winter is absolutely right about Tiger Woods’ personal life being none of our damn business. “Tiger Woods does not owe you an apology,” he writes. “He owes Mrs. Woods an apology. Apparently, she’s already accepted it. I could be wrong, and if I am, so what? It’s nobody’s business but Mr. and Mrs. Woods’ and their children’s. Not yours. Not mine.”

• Keith Raffel will appear on tomorrow’s edition of Press: Here--which he describes as “Silicon Valley’s version of Meet the Press”--to talk about “the suitability of the Valley as a setting for crime fiction” and, of course, his latest novel set there, Smasher. Press: Here begins on Sunday at 9 a.m. on KNTV, the San Francisco Bay Area’s NBC affiliate (cable channel 3). If you can’t wait to watch it then, just click here.

• Spinetingler Magazine is going through some pretty significant changes, beginning with a redesign that makes it look far more newsy than it did before. In a short post, non-fiction editor Brian Lindenmuth explains that “We are in beta at the moment, but as changes are happening we are posting reviews.”

• American right-wingers have become such nutty extremists about terrorism and torture over the last 10 years, that Ronald Reagan would now be considered a liberal on the matter.

• And a couple of interviews worth reading: J. Sydney Jones talks with Cara Black, author of the new Murder in the Palais Royal; and John Kenyon chats with Steve Hamilton about the latter’s recently published The Lock Artist. Meanwhile, Keith Rawson talks on video with T. Jefferson Parker about his new Iron River. And Jeff Rutherford’s latest Reading and Writing podcast interview is with suspense novelist Stephen White (The Siege).