Bullet Points: Post-Masters Tourney Edition

• Today begins the concluding round of blogger Jen Forbus’ “World’s Favorite Detective” competition. Cast your vote here for one of the two remaining contestants: Raymond Chandler’s iconic private eye, Philip Marlowe, or Michael Connelly’s LAPD detective, Harry Bosch. As I said before, my vote goes to Mr. Marlowe.

• In Davy Crockett’s Almanack, Evan Lewis has reprinted a fun quiz that he co-created years ago. It asks readers to match 13 memorable passages from first-person detective narratives with their authors. How many can you guess correctly? Lewis promises to post the answers here tomorrow.

• The 2010 Bouchercon Web site has added an Awards page to its contents. “[T]he important thing for you to know about it,” says conference chair Rae Helmsworth, “is if you haven’t received your e-mail Anthony ballot (spam filters, black holes, Evil Interweb Gremlins), you can download one from the Awards page and send it to our Fabulous Anthony Chair, Andi Shechter (that’s her official title). Nominations will be open until May 28.”

• This week’s short-story offering in Beat to a Pulp is called “The Show Must Go On,” written by Mark Robinson.

• Freelance author and editor Steve Holland makes a habit of digging up obscure mystery fictionists from both sides of the Atlantic. His latest subject is someone I’d never heard of before, but whose work I shall definitely watch for in the future: William Maconachie. As “Bart Carson,” he wrote hard-boiled novels with such delicious titles as Death Wore Scanties and The Lady Is a Spitfire. Oh, and the cover art on his books was often just as engaging!

• The new, themed issue of Clues: A Journal of Detection focuses on 20th-century writer Chester Himes, author of such works as The Real Cool Killers, The Crazy Kill, and Cotton Comes to Harlem. Managing editor Elizabeth Foxwell tells more about the contents here.

• Just over three years ago, on what would have been the 76th birthday of American actor David Janssen, I wrote a good-sized post about his starring role in the 1970s private-eye series Harry O. That generally well-written and character-rich show has long been among my favorite TV detective dramas, and I was lucky enough some years ago to get my hands on DVDs containing all of the episodes through a non-commercial source. Unfortunately, not everybody has been so lucky--which now prompts a petition drive by one Winifred Waite. She sent me the following note:

You were lucky to get your DVDs as so many people have been scammed or received poor-quality material. I’ve been keeping an eye on YouTube and other sites where people have reported about this.

I was recently involved in the Home Theater’s Live Chat with Warner Brothers, who state they have no plans to release Harry O on DVD at the moment. In the present economic climate, perhaps they are being naturally cautious. However, when you look at material they have released, the quality is nowhere near as good as the Harry O series. Strange!

It was a very popular series here in the UK and was screened on BBC in a prime Saturday evening slot. However, I have never seen it on telly since it was first screened over thirty years ago. No channels have screened it for years, [and] when you contact them they just say they don’t have the rights. I have to say I’d love to see this great show again. For me it was David Janssen at his best with fabulous material.

Therefore I have created a petition to send to Warner Brothers requesting that they release Harry O. If you would like to support it you can do it here http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/harryo/

Please feel free to pass this on to any friends you think would like to support it or post it on any Web site or forum. The more support the better!

For what it’s worth, I already signed the petition.

• Voting for this year’s Spingetingler Award winners is set to end on April 30. In advance of that, the sponsor, Spinetingler Magazine, is highlighting nominees in the individual categories. Click here to review the Best Cover contenders and their artists.

• I was sorry to hear about actress Dixie Carter’s death at age 70. Yes, I know, the Designing Women star’s connection to crime fiction was minimal (she did guest shots on both Quincy, M.E., and Diagnosis: Murder, appeared in one of the Perry Mason teleflicks, and was a regular on the 1999-2002 legal drama Family Law). But she still struck me as one hell of a performer, somebody whose passing deserves mention here.

• I’m not the first blogger to link to AbeBooks’ rundown of what it says are the “top ten train thrillers,” but the selections are pretty good, so they deserve mention here.

• Another fine list, and even related to the last item: “ 11 beautiful train stations that fell to the wrecking ball.”

• Republicans would be easier to take seriously if they weren’t such arrogant hypocrites. An example: Had cheating spouse and serial prostitute customer Senator David Vitter of Louisiana been a Democrat, members of the GOP would’ve berated him up one side and down the other, called for his resignation or forced removal, stormed his offices in angry protest, and probably burned him in effigy. Instead, because Vitter’s a right-winger and “family values” advocate, they applauded him at this last weekend’s Southern Republican Leadership Conference.

• You can copy the work of renowned American paperback illustrator Robert McGinnis, but you just can’t beat it.

• Author J. Sydney Jones has lately been posting some excellent interviews in his blog, Scene of the Crime. His latest conversation is with Rhys Bowen, “the Agatha and Anthony Award-winning author of the Molly Murphy Mystery series set in New York at the turn of the last century.”

• I remember Richard Basehart best for his role as Admiral Harriman Nelson on the TV series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, as well as for his appearances in the 1972 teleflick Assignment: Munich (the pilot for the Robert Conrad espionage drama Assignment: Vienna) and an excellent early episode of Columbo, “Dagger of the Mind.” But as Stephanie Kellerman, the mistress of a Web site devoted to Basehart’s career, tells CinemaRetro, during the mid-20th-century studio bosses in Hollywood “were expecting him to become a great star.” Kellerman says there were two reasons Basehart didn’t achieve that stardom: “One, he moved to Italy for a decade and was out of the public’s eye in the USA. And two, he accepted the role of Admiral Nelson in Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, with which he will be forever identified.” The interview with Kellerman is fascinating, and can be fully appreciated here.

• If ever there was a list that seems hard not to be curious about, it’s one titled “Top 10 Fascinating Secrets Taken to the Grave.”

• Even with Hillary Clinton now officially out of the running, there are still plenty of ideas for who President Obama should choose to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens. Slate offers up some names, as does The Huffington Post.

• Janet Rudolph has posted a reminder about this year’s Poisoned Pen Conference, set to take place from June 24 to 26 at the Arizona Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix.

• And Gar Anthony Haywood wonders what his career would have been like had he been inspired by James Crumley, rather than by Lawrence Block, Ross Macdonald, John D. McDonald, Raymond Chandler, and Jonathan Valin.