Thursday Linkfest

• As incredible as this seems, it was 20 years ago today that Twin Peaks, the ABC-TV series built around an ongoing investigation into the murder of small-town homecoming queen Laura Palmer, debuted in the United States--and quickly became a cultural phenomenon.

• The premiere issue of Needle: A Magazine of Noir is now available for a measly $7 from Lulu. I haven’t perused this new ink-on-paper pub myself yet, but I’m told it includes “hard-boiled, lean and mean” short fiction from more than a dozen contributors, including Hilary Davidson, Paul D. Brazill, Sandra Seamans, Cormac Brown, Eric Beetner, Jedidiah Ayres, and Keith Rawson.

• Congrats to Bookgasm’s Bruce Grossman for his 200th column!

• Well, this is too bad. First, we lost Vincent D’Onofrio and Kathryn Erbe from Law & Order: Criminal Intent. Now it looks as if S. Epatha Merkerson is leaving the original Law & Order after 16 years of playing Lieutenant Anita Van Buren.

• In the group blog Do Some Damage, Toronto author John McFetridge (Let It Ride) has begun serializing a story that he says, “I first wrote as a TV script, a pilot for a series I proposed called East Coast.” Part One is here; Part Two is here.

• Rap Sheet contributor Mark Coggins attends a super-secret subterranean event for fans of hard-boiled crime fiction, and lives to tell about it in The Huffington Post.

• Evan Lewis of the fine blog Davy Crockett’s Almanack gives Laurie Powers the rundown on his favorite pulp mags.

• The “Tea Party movement” is now as popular as socialism.

• Interviews worth your reading time: Denise Hamilton talks with The Elegant Variation about her new short-story collection, Los Angeles Noir 2: The Classics; Crime Scraps’ Uriah Robinson (aka Norman Price) has begun posting a multi-part conversation with R.N. “Roger” Morris on the subject of that author’s new 19th-century Russian historical mystery, A Razor Wrapped in Silk (click here for Part One; click here for Part Two); John Banville talks with PowellsBooks.Blog about both his mainstream fiction and the mysteries he pens as “Benjamin Black”; blogger Jedidiah Ayres chats up Duane Swierczynski in Hard-boiled Wonderland on the subject of Swierczynski new novel, Expiration Date, and then Ayres himself is quizzed by BSC Review as part of its “Conversations with the Bookless” series; Spinetingler Magazine has another “Conversations with the Bookless” installment, this one focusing on Northern Irish writer Gerard Brennan; Art Taylor goes one-on-one with Jon Jefferson, who--with Bill Blass--writes the “Jefferson Bass” forensic mysteries; and Crime Watch’s Craig Sisterson fires nine questions at Jack Kerley, author of the Alabama-set Carson Ryder series.

• Is there a market for an annual best-of anthology of online stories?

• I, for one, had never heard about this controversy surrounding artist “Richard Chopping’s stylish covers for Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels.” How about you? (Hat tip to The HMSS Weblog.)

• With spring threatening to pop out all over the United States--despite persistent cold in some quarters--Janet Rudolph’s thoughts turn to today’s bumper crop of gardening mysteries.

• TV Shows on DVD brings word that the remaining 19 episodes of the fourth season of Have Gun--Will Travel will go on sale as a DVD package on July 6.

• And in addition to the already popular 2010 Global Reading Challenge, there’s now a more specific Scandinavian Reading Challenge. Book lovers who engage in both are either to be commended ... or committed.