Bullet Points: All the Links That Fit

• Patti Abbott has posted the list of short stories to be found in the Bill Crider-edited November release, Damn Near Dead 2: Live Noir or Die Trying (Busted Flush). And I see the names of several Rap Sheet writers among the contributors to this second anthology of “geezer noir”: Declan Burke, Gary Phillips, and Cameron Hughes (who is using the extended byline Cameron Pierce Hughes, which has a certain pretentious charm to it). Works by Ace Atkins, Ed Gorman, Anthony Neil Smith, and Russel D. McLean, who have submitted one or more posts to this page, are also included. Congratulations one and all.

• And there’s more news about Rap Sheet bloggers: Two of them have essays in the must-have new book, Thrillers: 100 Must Reads, edited by David Morrell and Hank Wagner. Ali Karim writes in that volume about Eric Ambler’s A Coffin for Dimitrios, while novelist Linda L. Richards tackles Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Identity. In addition, Max Allan Collins--who has probably contributed enough in the way of guest essays and interviews to be considered an honorary Rap Sheeter, has a piece in the book about Mickey Spillane’s One Lonely Night. Thrillers: 100 Must Reads comes from Oceanviewe Publishing.

• Speaking of Collins, he writes on his own Web site that fans of Quarry, his hired-killer series protagonist, “may be relieved to learn that I’ve signed with Perfect Crime books to reprint the first five Quarry novels in individual volumes. Cover artist will be a guy named Terry Beatty you may have heard of. We are using the re-titling from the Foul Play ’80s reprints, and Primary Target will get a new title, to make it ‘fit’ the titling pattern of the others: Quarry’s Vote.”

• A DVD release of the fourth season of Ironside, the popular 1967-1975 NBC-TV series starring Raymond Burr, is tentatively planned for Fall 2010.

• Meanwhile, Life on Mars--The Complete Collection has just reached DVD sales racks from Acorn Media. This is the original British version of the TV series, which spawned a less-successful and short-lived, but still interesting American version in 2008. This eight-disc set retails for $79.99. (Hat tip to Mystery Book News.)

• This is not the sort of advertisement you want to see spread around, only months before you’re up for election to the U.S. Senate.

• Along with the welcome release of its third short-story collection, Blood, Guts & Whiskey, comes some concerning news: The Web fiction ’zine ThugLit has posted the following message on its Submissions page: “ThugLit is no longer accepting submissions--Thanks.” What does this mean? Blogger-editor David Cranmer wrote a note to ThugLit mastermind Todd Robinson and was told simply that “more details will be forthcoming.” Uh-oh. I hope this doesn’t spell the Webzine’s end.

• The Gumshoe Site’s Jiro Kimura brings this sad news: “Ann Waldron died of heart failure at her home in Princeton, New Jersey. She may be famous for writing Eudora: A Writer’s Life (Doubleday, 1998), an unauthorized biography of Eudora Welty, a renowned admirer of Ross Macdonald’s works, [but] she also authored books for children and young adults. The ex-journalist ... [wrote] five mystery novels featuring McLeod Delaney, journalist-turned-professor at Princeton University, starting with The Princeton Murders (Berkley, 2003) and ending with The Princeton Impostor (2007). She was 85.”

• Another new blog worth watching: Squeezegut Alley, written by Nicolas Pillai. What interested me right off the bat was Pillai’s tribute to the work of Ross Macdonald. He writes, in part: “Go to Dashiell Hammett for ice-pick ruthlessness. Not a spot of ruth in his prose. Go to Raymond Chandler for the romance of the city and the well-turned quip about the well-turned ankle. But go to Macdonald and you find violent emotions and secret cruelties. The family melodrama told by a man tired of hearing lies.” Nicely put, sir.

• Blogger Cullen Gallagher has posted an appreciation of the Webzine Beat to a Pulp. “Selectivity and consistency,” he writes, “are two of the biggest merits of BTAP, and I have no doubt that [editors David Cranmer and Elaine Ash] will keep up the good work for a long time coming.”

• Understatement of the week, maybe of the year: “President Obama is not exactly pursuing a laidback, static agenda.”--Steve Benen of The Washington Monthly

• There are several crime dramas among this year’s Emmy nominees.

• Probably not safe for work computers is this controversial Russian airline advertisement, which should put some heat into your summer.

• I wrote in April about a new James Grant music video that had cast both Scottish crime novelist Tony Black and the “Godfather of Tartan Noir,” William McIlvanney (Laidlaw). The first cut of that video, “My Father’s Coat,” can now be seen here.

• Interviews that deserve mentioning: J. Sydney Jones talks with Qiu Xiaolong about his Shanghai-set Inspector Chen novels; Kelli Stanley chats up Rebecca Cantrell; and Julia Buckley speaks with Mike Lawson.

• The latest trailer for Boardwalk Empire, director Martin Scorsese’s HBO-TV series, set to debut in the fall of this year, makes me look forward to this show even more than I had been.

• I’m annoyed by this language development, too.

• From Craig Sisterson’s Crime Watch blog: “[I]t was announced in the last couple of days that marketing maestro James Patterson is officially the first novelist ever to surpass the 1,000,000 mark for e-book sales.”

• And this is another reason why I don’t own an e-book reader: “It will take you longer to read a book on an iPad or Kindle compared to the printed page, according to a recent study.” You can read more here. (Hat tip to January Magazine.)