Checking All the Corners

• It’s been a rather long wait between issues (the previous one came out last August), but there’s finally a new edition of Richard Helms’ Back Alley Webzine available. It includes stories by Stephen D. Rogers, Angela Zeman, and Nikki Dolson. Plus, you’ll find the sixth installment of Back Alley’s seven-part serialization of Frank Norris’ 1899 “naturalistic proto-noir novel,” McTeague. Read it all here.

• Christa Faust has unveiled the cover illustration for Choke Hold, her forthcoming sequel to 2007’s Money Shot. The artwork was done by frequent Hard Case Crime contributor Glen Orbik. You can see the cover for yourself right here.

• Beat to a Pulp’s new weekly short-story offering, “Contact Shots Are Bad Like That,” comes from American Midwesterner Derek Kelly.

• Black Mask magazine was so cool!

• By the way, did you know that crime-fiction editor Otto Penzler has assembled, for publisher Vintage Crime, an 1,168-page collection of yarns called The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories (due in bookstores in mid-September)? That’s the same page count as his outstanding 2007 anthology, The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps.

• Despite widespread concerns to the contrary, the critically heralded cop series Southland has been renewed for a third season by TNT-TV. Crimespree Cinema reports that “The network has ordered 10 episodes for the third season, which is slated to begin airing in January 2011.”

• Drat! I missed last night’s episode of TV Confidential, the Internet radio series (hosted by Ed Robertson and Frankie Montiforte) that often includes interviews with people who were involved in classic crime dramas for the large or small screens. Last night’s installment featured Emmy Award-winning director Paul Bogart, among whose credits are The Defenders, Get Smart, and two memorable James Garner flicks: Marlowe (1969) and Skin Game (1971). If, like me, you forgot to tune in, rest assured that that the episode will be rebroadcast this coming Friday, April 30, at 7 p.m. ET/PT on Share-a-Vision Radio, KSAV.org.

• This Showtime-TV mash-up of the 2008 James Bond film, Quantum of Solace, with 1961’s West Side Story is pretty clever.

• Wednesday, April 28, will mark the 80th birthday of series character Nancy Drew. As the Nancy Drew Sleuth Unofficial Web Site notes, the first three books featuring the precocious girl detective from River Heights were published on that date back in 1930. To celebrate this occasion, the Poisoned Pen Bookstore in Scottsdale, Arizona, has scheduled a party to be attended by Jenn Fisher, author of Clues for Real Life: The Wit and Wisdom of Nancy Drew (2007). The festivities will include giveaways and other prizes, and should get started at the Poisoned Pen at 7 p.m. on the 28th. (Hat tip to Lesa’s Book Critiques.)

• Oh, yeah, what can go wrong with this idea?

• Gary Dobbs celebrates TV detectives of the 1970s.

• Some interviews worth checking out: Sons of Spade blogger Jochem van der Steen talks with Tom Schreck, author of the Duffy Dombrowski mysteries; J. Sydney Jones chats up Laurie R. King, whose latest Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes novel is The God of the Hive; Thomas Kaufman (Drink the Tea) submits to questioning by Spinetingler Magazine; and Stephen D. Rogers fires a few queries at Thomas Perry, whose new standalone thriller, Strip, has just been released. Meanwhile, Keith Rawson conducts a video interview with Ace Atkins, during which they discuss Atkins’ brand-new novel, Infamous, as well as “the future of his popular P.I. character, Nick Travers, and his upcoming series of cotemporary crime novels.”

• Sigh ... Another author I’d never heard of before.

• At the root of Arizona’s hateful and “immoral” new anti-immigrant legislation, is it just all about Republicans trying to hold onto their endangered power in the state?

• Winners of the annual Reviewers’ Choice Awards.

• Lovely actress Marisa Tomei (who I always think of in her fabulous role in My Cousin Vinny) has apparently signed on to play Matthew McConaughey’s wife in the film adaptation of Michael Connelly’s 2005 novel, The Lincoln Lawyer.

• And just five years ago, YouTube received its first video upload.