• I’m not an e-book reader. My computer is exclusively for work, not leisure reading. And the only time I can imagine having a need for one of those Kindle thingys is when traveling abroad--so that my luggage won’t be weighted down with the usual 20 pounds or more of books to keep me entertained during quiet moments. However, if I was an e-book reader, the opportunity to pick up Libby Fischer Hellmann’s two new collections of short stories, Nice Girl Does Noir, Volumes 1 and 2, would probably be great. As she explained in a recent e-mail note, “All the stories have been previously published in print anthologies or magazines. Volume 1 includes five stories featuring Ellie Foreman and Georgia Davis, the protagonists of my crime-fiction series. Among them is the short story that became the ‘prequel’ for all my books. Volume 2 includes 10 ‘stand-alones.’ Some are set in Chicago, some are not. Some are historicals, some are set in the here and now. Some are truly noir, others are darkly comic, and one doesn’t include a murder at all.” Click here to learn more about ordering these releases.
• For folks who love cop films.
• I’m very to sorry to hear that TV personality Art Linkletter died today at age 97. He was an entertainment fixture of my boyhood.
• This story, about the last typewriter-user being booted out of the Greenwich Village Writers Room, just makes me sad. It also reminds of the thrills I used to derive, as a younger man, from taking my own typewriter into a local bar, and writing my articles for newspapers or magazines there. Sure, some people used to look askance at me, working in what they thought of as a place of pleasure. But there were also many folks I met through typing in a bar, who gave me good stories for later use. I shall always cherish my memories of those times, and it’s regrettable that nobody else is likely to hear the confident chatter of typewriter keys in public places at anytime in the near future.
• Spinetingler Magazine has the trailer and poster promoting the forthcoming film adaptation of Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me.
• Meanwhile, a big-screen version of Elmore Leonard’s 1978 novel, The Switch, is apparently in the works.
• Finally! Season 2 of McMillan & Wife, the 1970s NBC Mystery Movie series starring Rock Hudson and Susan Saint James, will have a DVD release in Canada in late August. The Web site TV Shows on DVD reports that Toronto-based Visual Entertainment Incorporated “plans to distribute the title in the USA later this year, at a date which they hope to finalize shortly.” You may remember that McMillan & Wife--Season 1 went on sale way back in 2005. Let’s hope there isn’t another five-year lag time before the circulation of Season 3.
• Although I don’t read books about real crimes with the same frequency that I do crime fiction, even a dabbler like me knows that some of the choices on this list of the “25 Best True Crime Books” are classics.
• Interviews worth reading: Bookgasm editor Ron Lott talks with Ace Atkins about his latest work, Infamous, “a novelized version of Machine Gun Kelly’s 1933 kidnapping of an Oklahoma City oilman”; J. Sydney Jones chats up Peter Steiner, the New Yorker cartoonist and author of three books in the Louis Morgon series; John Kenyon goes one-on-one with Charlie Stella, the author most recently of Johnny Porno; and David Cranmer fires seven questions at short-story writer Kieran Shea.
• And wouldn’t it be fun if these were still in production.
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
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1 comment:
I know what you mean about typewriters. When I was in high school (somewhere around the Cro-Magnon era, I think), I used to use the typewriter room at the Donnell Library on 53rd St. in New York City - it's where I typed my notes, wrote school papers, etc. I grew up with a manual typewriter; even at work, I used a manual until they were finally replaced by computers in the 1990s. I hated electrics. I do miss my old Olivetti (and the Underwood that came before it).
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