Bullet Points: Olympics Finale Edition

• Norwegian author Jo Nesbø has won the Palle Rosenkrantz Prize, presented by the Danish Crime Writing Academy for the year’s Best Crime Novel. Of course, the victorious Nesbø work, Panserhjerte (aka The Leopard), hasn’t yet been translated for English-speaking readers. But maybe someday soon ...

• This week’s short fiction in Beat to a Pulp comes from Frederick Zackel, who’s offering an excerpt from his 1980 novel, Cinderella After Midnight (recently re-released via Kindle).

• Martin Edwards gives just praise to an unjustly forgotten work of crime-fiction scholarship, Detectionary (1977), edited by Otto Penzler, Chris Steinbrunner, and Marvin Lachman. I still have a paperback copy of that book in my library, and its has proved to be immensely useful, as well as fascinating, at times.

• Davy Crockett’s Almanack is celebrating the thoroughly engaging 1970s Raymond Chandler novel covers illustrated by Tom Adams. Thanks, Mr. Lewis.

• With Bouchercon 2010 preparing to draw myriad crime-fiction fans to San Francisco this fall, here’s something cool for people who know little about that wonderful city’s past, and even for those of us who do. A history Web site called SepiaTown is collecting old photographs and integrating them with a Google map “to create a virtually strollable San Francisco” of yore. You can click around downtown and see what the city was like before the 1906 earthquake and fire, the coming of the Beats, and the erection of the TransAmerica Pyramid. Click here for more information.

• British journalist-turned-author Jim Kelly talks with Shots’ Amy Myers about his love of Golden Age mystery fiction, his history in a family of cops, and of course his new novel, Death Watch, the second outing for Detective Inspector Peter Shaw and his colleague, Detective Sergeant George Valentine (Death Wore White). You’ll find their intriguing exchange here.

• An extremely important point regarding the present fight in Congress over health-care reform legislation: No one's talking about passing health care reform through reconciliation. There’s no need to pass health care reform through reconciliation--health care reform has already passed. ... The next step isn’t passing health care reform through reconciliation; the next step is passing a budget fix that improves the legislation that’s already passed. That, of course, is why reconciliation exists.” More here and here.

• Meanwhile, the consequences of reform’s failure, here and here.

• After reading blogger August West’s excellent recent write-up about the 1975 western novel, The Shootist, by Glendon Swarthout, I decided last night to rent the 1976 big-screen adaptation of Swarthout’s tale, which represented John Wayne’s final film appearance. I remembered the movie as being a giant cut above many cinematic westerns, which I can now confirm. But what I had forgotten was that this picture was a reunion of sorts for three members of the cast from Hec Ramsey (1972-1974), the underappreciated Richard Boone western-detective drama that became part of the NBC Sunday Mystery Movie “wheel series.” Not only did Boone appear in The Shootist as the revenge-seeking sibling of a man Wayne’s character had killed, but Harry Morgan (who’d played a small-town doctor in Hec Ramsey opposite Boone’s gunfighter turned lawman) featured in The Shootist as a less-than-courageous sheriff, and Richard Lenz (who had served as Boone’s inexperienced boss on the TV series) co-starred in this film as a newspaperman hoping to exploit Wayne’s character for his own profit. It was good to see them working together again. Now, if only we could get all 10 episodes of Hec Ramsey into a DVD release ...

• Ex-FBI agent Paul Lindsay, the real writer behind the “Noah Boyd” byline on Bricklayer, talks with the Boston Herald about the highs and lows of his previous career. (Hat tip to Sarah Weinman.)

• John McFetridge submits his new novel, Let It Ride, to Marshal Zeringue’s famous Page 69 Test. The results can be enjoyed here.

• Actor Dennis Farina, who starred in Law & Order, Crime Story, and Buddy Faro, has been cast in a new horse-racing drama pilot for HBO-TV called Luck. The director will be Michael Mann, with whom Farina worked on Crime Story, and the pilot’s writer is David Milch, who created the phenomenal Deadwood and worked previously on NYPD Blue. With all of that talent, Luck will be unlucky indeed if it can’t make it big.

• Keith Rawson talks with Dennis Tafoya, the author of Dope Thief, for the BSC (Bookspot Central) Review site.

• And the A&E TV network has ordered 13 episodes of a new crime drama, Sugarloaf, to debut sometime this summer. As the Crimespree Cinema blog explains, “Sugarloaf stars Australian Matt Passmore ... as Jim Longworth, a former Chicago homicide detective,” who, “after being accused of sleeping with the wife of his former captain, finds himself leaving Chicago, looking to start anew. He ends up in ... [a Florida] resort town that appears quiet and peaceful. But since this is a television drama, the town is not as sleepy as it appears.” Sounds promising.