Bullet Points: Midweek Musings Edition

• Blogger Jen Forbus has opened Round One of her “World’s Favorite Detective” tournament. You’re asked to select your favorite character in 32 head-to-head matches (some of which compel you to make ridiculously agonizing choices), and you only have until midnight on Friday, March 12, to do so. The 16 top vote-getters from this week will go up against each other next week. Click here to make your preferences known.

• You just knew this was going to happen, didn’t you. Mystery Fanfare’s Janet Rudolph reports that “A host of books on the late Stieg Larsson are being written--or have been written.” But the first one scheduled to appear is The Man Who Left Too Soon, penned by British critic Barry Forshaw (author of British Crime Writing: An Encyclopedia) and due out next month from UK publisher John Blake.

• Speaking of forthcoming works, how about Agents of Treachery (Vintage Crime/Black Lizard), edited by Otto Penzler? As B.V. Lawson of In Reference to Murder explains, this book will be “the first collection of original espionage fiction yet published. It’s a project [Penzler has] been trying to get off the ground for years, but has been on hold for various reasons.” Among the contributors to the anthology (which is due out in late May) are Lee Child, Joseph Finder, Charles McCarry, David Morrell, Stella Rimington, and Robert Wilson.

• And Rap Sheet contributor Gary Phillips will soon see his novella, The Underbelly, which started out as a 16-part serial on the housing-advocacy Web site FourStory, published in book form. PM Press has the 144-page work (which will also feature an interview with Phillips) primed for release in early June. Spinetingler Magazine offers more information about the book.

• As Max Allan Collins reminds us, crime novelist Mickey Spillane was born on this date in 1918. He died in 2006 at 88 years old.

• Another good reason to finish passing health-care reform.

• From Bookgasm: “St. Martin’s [Press] is giving away six autographed copies of Duane Swierczynski’s new novel, the time-travel murder-mystery Expiration Date, plus original illustrations featured in the book by comics artist Laurence Campbell. Enter now at Minotaur Books through April 17. While you’re there, read the first 50 pages, which will be serialized weekly.”

• Back in 2005, January Magazine contributor Kevin Burton Smith wrote enthusiastically about a short-story collection called Controlled Burn: Stories of Prison, Crime, and Men, written by Scott Wolven. “The men who populate these hard-bitten tales,” Smith remarked, “are burning, all right, smoldering with a fiery anger and resentment barely held in check by the grim fatalism and gritted-teeth pragmatism that constitutes the code by which they live. One of the few books that really rocked me in 2005, this collection offers a swirling kaleidoscope of heartbreak, pride and busted dreams, an episodic road trip of character-driven vignettes ...” It seems Wolven’s fiction turned the heads of other people than Smith. Director Jordan Bloch has made a short film from “Underdogs,” one of the stories in Controlled Burn. I don’t see a release date mentioned anywhere yet, but here’s the trailer.

• J. Sydney Jones has posted an excellent interview with Michael Genelin, the author so far of two novels featuring Slovokian police commander Jana Matinova.

• Having written recently about John Buchan’s 1915 adventure novel, The Thirty-Nine Steps--acclaimed as “one of the earliest examples of the ‘man-on-the-run’ thriller archetype”--I was intrigued to see David Vineyard’s extensive cataloguing, in Mystery*File, of similar works in which “a person, usually male, finds himself pursued by a deadly enemy for most of the book.” Vineyard’s checklist of man-on-the-run thrillers is available here.

• Are gumshoes making a Hollywood comeback? Variety thinks so.

• And it appears there’s a new ink-on-paper publication in the works: Needle: A Magazine of Noir, which is being put together by Steve Weddle and John Hornor Jacobs. It’s apparently going to be a print-on-demand periodical, costing under $10 per issue, and there are already some well-known talents lined up for the debut edition. But it sounds as if the debut of Needle hasn’t yet been settled.