Bullet Points: Pre-Anniversary Edition

• Salon critic Heather Havrilesky proclaims that the buddy cops “dramedy,” The Good Guys--which previews tonight on FOX-TV at 8 p.m. and stars The West Wing’s Bradley Whitford in a mustache--“is about the right speed for summer TV.”

• This ought to give anyone planning to attend October’s Bouchercon in San Francisco some ideas: Ben Terrall (who I interviewed last spring about his father, noted crime writer Robert Terrall) has a new piece in the city’s Bay Guardian newspaper about San Francisco’s underbelly, as seen through the famous Dashiell Hammett Tour. You can read it here.

• By the way, I hope Bouchercon officials will organize groups of conventioneers to participate in Don Herron’s wonderful tour.

• Eric Beetner’s short story “Ditch,” originally published in ThugLit, appears to be the only work of crime fiction on the top-10 list of tales contending for this year’s StorySouth Million Writers Award. The reading public will choose the winner, so if you’re interested in voting, click here.

• Author Max Allan Collins reports that he’s “plugging away at Return to Perdition, which is at about the halfway point of its around 200 pages.” He adds that “This is the graphic novel finale to the Perdition saga, although not necessarily the last Perdition book.”

• Congratulations to The Lipstick Chronicles on its fifth birthday.

• After getting his feet wet with multi-part celebrations of The Saint and Sherlock Holmes, Gary Dobbs of The Tainted Archive is now preparing a similar blogfest centered around “the world of the TV cop show.” Included in the offerings, to be posted during the first weekend in June,

will be an interview with real-life Los Angeles police detective Paul Bishop, who writes the books and music blog Bish’s Beat.

• The cast of CBS-TV’s Hawaii Five-O reboot seems to be well in place. There’s even a preview of the show, currently available on YouTube (and embedded at right). I have to admit that, while it isn’t the original Jack Lord series, it doesn’t look half bad.

• Something tells me this fashion trend won’t last long.

• Mark Coggins’ latest P.I. August Riordan novel, The Big Wake-Up (Bleak House Books), has won top honors in the 2010 Independent Publishers Book Awards competition for Mystery/Suspense/Thriller fiction. There was a tie for second place between Death of a Bronx Cop, by Tom Walker (iUniverse), and Shamrock Alley, by Ronald Damien Malfi (Medallion Press, Inc.). Third place went to Dead Air, by Deborah Shlian and Linda Reid (Oceanview Publishing).

• Spinetingler Magazine has the cover art from Dennis Lehane’s forthcoming (in November) Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro novel, Moonlight Mile, plus a plot synopsis for this much-anticipated sequel to 1998’s Gone, Baby, Gone. Look for it all here.

• A perfect Christmas gift for every fan of The Avengers on your list.

• And this one is ideal for Ian Rankin followers.

• Release of Ellery Queen--The Complete Series on DVD has been postponed from August 24 to September 21. Don’t ask me why.

• Salon’s Laura Miller analyzes the Stieg Larsson phenomenon.

• Is it just my imagination, or is disgraced former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich becoming more ridiculous and irrelevant by the day? UPDATE: There’s more about Gingrich’s ludicrous rhetoric here.

• Actor Burt Reynolds is apparently planning a guest appearance on Burn Notice during the upcoming fourth season of that Miami-set USA Network series. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear that he’s been cast as an older B.L. Stryker, the Miami private eye he played for two years on a not-altogether-bad ABC-TV series back in 1989-1990.

• Interviews worth reading: The Powell’s Books blog talks with Scott Turow about his new sequel to Presumed Innocent, simply titled Innocent; J. Sydney Jones takes on Barbara Nadel, author of the Turkish Inspector İkmen series; and Craig Sisterson fires questions at Craig Russell, Scottish author of the Jan Fabel and Lennox thrillers.

• Meanwhile, for Bookdagger, Chris Ewan has recorded an interview in which he talks about his writing inspirations, protagonist Charlie Howard, and his latest novel, The Good Thief’s Guide to Vegas--already available in Britain, but not due out in the States until August.

• More woes for TNT-TV’s Southland.

• And from The Gumshoe Site comes word that “Robert J. Serling, older brother of [The Twilight Zone’s] Rod Serling, died on May 6 in Tucson, Arizona. The ex-UPI aviation editor wrote The President’s Plane Is Missing (Doubleday, 1967), which was made into a 1973 TV movie. Serling wrote other novels including its sequel, Air Force One Is Haunted (St. Martin’s, 1985), featuring Jeremy Haines, and McDermott’s Sky (Stein & Day, 1977). He was 92.”