Of Contests, Cuba, and Campanella

• The Drowning Machine blog has launched its second annual Watery Grave Invitational Short Story Contest. In order to enter, you must have published a crime-fiction short story of no more than 3,000 words long “in any format that is available for the public to read.” And that story “must have been published on or prior to April 15, 2010.” E-mail a direct link to your story to beauvallet@aol.com by noon EST, on Friday, May 7, 2010. Ten new contestants will be invited to participate in this contest, along with last year’s top five contenders. All will be asked to write original stories of no more than 3,500 words and submit them by May 24. A panel of judges will select a winner and two runner-ups; there’s even prize money involved. Full contest details can be found by clicking here.

• When I interviewed Philip Kerr more than a month ago, the British author told me that he was working on a new Bernie Gunther novel, “quite a bit of it set in a Soviet POW camp.” I noticed over the weekend that that book, titled Field Grey, is now being promoted through the Amazon UK site. The plot write-up reads:

It’s 1954 and Bernie has tired of his increasingly dangerous work spying on Meyer Lansky for Cuban Intelligence. He secretly buys a boat and sails to Florida, where he’s arrested, sent back to Cuba and imprisoned in the Isle of Pines. There he meets Castro and a French intelligence officer, Thibaud, who liaises between the CIA and French intelligence. Exhaustively questioned by Thibaud, Bernie finds himself flown back to Berlin and another prison cell with a proposition: work for the French or hang for murder. Bernie’s job is simple: to meet and greet POWs returning from Germany. One of these is Edgard de Boudel, a French war criminal and member of the French SS, who has been posing as a German Wehrmacht officer. The French are anxious to catch up with this man and deal with him in their own ruthless way. But Bernie’s past as a German POW in Russia is about to catch up with him--in a way he could never have foreseen.

Field Grey is due out in Britain in late October, published by Quercus. I don’t see anything about a U.S. pub date yet, but if patterns of the recent past hold true, it should be released in the States by Putnam sometime in early 2011.

• Is it true that guns + lingerie = book sales?

• The latest short-fiction offering in Beat to a Pulp comes from Nebraska writer Wayne Dundee. His story is called “Apache Fog.”

• Actor Joseph Campanella, who co-starred in Mannix during its first year, and also appeared on such familiar TV dramas as The Bold Ones, The Name of the Game, and The Rockford Files, will join hosts Ed Robertson and Frankie Montiforte on tonight’s edition of the Web radio program TV Confidential. That show starts at 9 p.m. ET, 6 p.m. PT on Shokus Internet Radio, and will be rebroadcast this coming Friday, May 7, at 7 p.m. ET/PT on Share-a-Vision Radio, KSAV.org. Campanella is slated to join the hosts during their second broadcast hour.

• This is one reason why Republicans aren’t taken seriously.

• The submission process is now open to anyone wishing to contribute to the fourth edition of The Lineup: Poems on Crime. Co-editor Gerald So explains that poems of 50 lines or fewer will be considered between now and July 31. Full guidelines are available here.

• Over this last weekend, the Independent Book Publishers Association announced its finalists for the 2010 Benjamin Franklin Awards. Competing in the Mystery/Suspense category are: The Bone Chamber, by Robin Burcell (Poisoned Pen Press); Jump, by Tim Maleeny (Poisoned Pen Press); and In Their Blood, by Sharon Potts (Oceanview Publishing). Winners in this and other categories will be named during a presentation to be held at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City on May 24.

• Critic Sarah Weinman chooses her favorite true-crime books.

• And Winter’s Bone, the movie based on Daniel Woodrell’s wonderful 2006 novel of the same name, isn’t due for wide release in the States until June. But here’s the trailer--which looks good enough to pull me into a theater, even though I already read the book.