Bullet Points: Ashes and Slashers Edition

• Concluding her weeklong celebration of Washington novelist Earl Emerson (Cape Disappointment), Naomi Johnson talks with the author about the importance of setting in his books, why he brought fictional P.I. Thomas Black out of mothballs, and his day-job experiences as a firefighter. Read it here.

• Is The Man from U.N.C.L.E. really bound for a big-screen treatment? Find out more about the possibilities here, here, and here.

• New in Beat to a Pulp: “Doggy Day Care,” by Richard Prosch.

• Recent Rap Sheet contributor Ed Lin submits his new novel, Snakes Can’t Run (Minotaur Books), to Marshal Zeringue’s Page 69 Test. The results are here.

• To help inaugurate a new feature in his blog (“I plan to interview editors and agents as well as writers on the use of spirit of place in fiction, thus providing input from all sides of publishing”), J. Sydney Jones talks with Peter Joseph, an editor at St. Martin’s Press who, among other things, “acquires mysteries and thrillers under the Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Minotaur imprint.”

• Ooo-la-la!

• Online polls are notoriously unscientific, and blogger Jen Forbus’ “World’s Favorite Detective” competition is no exception. The idea was OK, and Forbus did a remarkable job of organizing the whole thing. But the idea that Michael Connelly’s LAPD detective, Harry Bosch, should have walked away the winner is pretty disappointing. Bosch is an interesting character, but there’s no way in hell he merits top honors over such other literary heavyweights as Philip Marlowe, Sherlock Holmes, Sam Spade, Lew Archer, and Spenser.

• The English Riviera Festival of Crime and Thriller Writing begins this coming Tuesday, April 20. A full schedule of events can be found here. (Hat tip to In Reference to Murder.)

• The crime-fiction e-zine Plots With Guns is putting out a call for submissions to its upcoming “New Slashers” edition. Explains editor Anthony Neil Smith:

For our October issue of Plots With Guns, we want horror. We want the sort of shit-your-pants horror that comes not like a sudden shock on the screen, but the kind that makes you increasingly nervous for hours and days after reading it. And we want the kind of nostalgia-bending fiction that reminds us of all those movies from the ’80s where the slutty people died first.

Yep, we want some new slashers.

Make up a slasher and put him or her in a story that will make my balls shrivel up. It can be an origin story, or a “sequel,” or anything in-between. As long as this is a completely new made-up slasher that will freak us the hell out.

And the story has to have a gun in it.

Our typical “contemporary setting” restriction is out the window for this one as well. It can be a slasher from any age, past, present, or future.

We’d like ’em under 5K, please. Deadline will be early September. Issue will be posted in mid October.

• In addition to the previously mentioned flash-fiction challenge posed by Patti Abbott and Gerald So (deadline May 1), there’s also a new short-story contest being organized by writer Jason Duke. Submissions should run 2,000-3,500 words in length and be submitted by mid-May. The winner and runner-up will be published in Crimefactory. Full contest details are available here.

• Chad Rohrbacher is hosting yet another flash-fiction challenge, this one built around 1,500-word crime or superhero yarns. But the deadline for entering is tomorrow, with finished copy due in a week.

• Morons with microphones: stupidest statement of the week.

• Could Southland be cancelled--again?

• If you haven’t already noticed, Scottish novelist Ian Parnham has been blogging about each new episode of the third and final season of Ashes to Ashes, the British sequel to Life on Mars. Series 3 of Ashes to Ashes debuted on April 2.

• The latest edition of Mystery Readers Journal, and the first one to be published in 2010, focuses on mystery fiction set on the African continent. More about that here.

• Must ... have ... this ... book!

• Actor, author, and blogger Gary M. Dobbs muses on the incorporation of the notorious Jack the Ripper into modern crime fiction, in advance of the publication of his e-book, A Policeman’s Lot.

• Paul D. Brazill is writing is serial tale, “Warsaw Moon,” for the Web-based literary journal Disenthralled. You can read Part I here; Part II is to be found here.

• I, for one, would love to see this movie again.

• Not long ago, I acquired a DVD copy of the TV pilot film Genesis II, a Gene Roddenberry production that I hadn’t seen since it’s original broadcast in 1973. (Not surprisingly, my memories of that film made it somewhat better than I thought it was the second time around.) So I was interested to see blogger Randy Johnson writing about both Genesis II and Roddenberry’s second, related science-fiction pilot, Planet Earth (1974). But now, I have this strong urge to buy both pictures. Dammit!

• And here’s a rare clip from the unsold 1997 pilot for a Hawaii Five-O remake, starring Gary Busey and Russell Wong.