The Friday Feast

• Although The Rap Sheet isn’t contributing to today’s collection of “forgotten books” posts, there are still plenty of other bloggers adding their suggestions to the growing stack. Check out the following crime-fiction picks: The Man I Killed, by Shel Walker; Poacher’s Road, by John Brady; Death of an Old Girl, by Elizabeth Lemarchand; The Patch, by Cherokee Paul McDonald; Murder on Mike, by H. Paul Jeffers; Heart to Heart, by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac; Nineteen Stories, by Graham Greene; Pity Him Afterwards, by Donald E. Westlake; and Blow Your House Down, by Pat Barker.

• Patti Abbott talks about the origins of that forgotten books series here, with still more of her explanation here.

• Pretty funny stuff: “10 Criminals Dumber Than the Crime.”

• Jiro Kimura of The Gumshoe Site reports that Joan Chase Bowden, “one of the ghostwriters of [the] schoolgirl shamus Trixie Belden mystery novels under the Kathryn Kenny house name,” passed away on June 23 in San Diego, California. She was 85 years old. Kimura says that Bowden wrote at least four of the Belden novels, including The Mystery of the Headless Horseman (1979).

• If I were a resident of London, you’d better believe I would attend this series of talks taking place over the next few months. “Curated” by editor and author Maxim Jakubowski, the series will address the “warm love affair between British and American and Italian literature and culture” through the eyes of mystery writers such as Iain Pears, Donna Leon, and David Hewson.

• Bookdagger talks with former French diplomat and historical mystery author Jean-François Parot about his late-18th-century crime novels featuring police commissioner Nicolas Le Floch. Read that interview here.

• Wow, talk about small libraries!

• Patti Abbott turned me on to the blog Sea Minor, managed by British teacher and writer Nigel P. Bird. Bird has been soliciting people involved in the crime-fiction community to ... well, interview themselves. (That kinda takes the burden off him, doesn’t it? Why didn’t I think to do such a thing?) Among his recent self-interrogators have been Crimespree Magazine editor Jon Jordan, pulp writer and Crimefactory co-editor Keith Rawson, author R.J. Ellory, and Naomi Johnson of The Drowning Machine. Bird announced recently that he has convinced a number of other notable talents to add their own voices to this “Dancing with Myself” series in the near future, including Megan Abbott and Mark Billingham.

• I don’t usually go to Tom Cruise movies (because the guy’s too full of himself--and more than a bit weird, to boot), but yesterday’s news that the lovely Paula Patton will join the cast of Mission: Impossible 4 might actually get me into a theater seat.

• Dan Brown--most unwanted author?

• In case you haven’t noticed, blogger Paul D. Brazill has been expanding a series of interviews with “crime writers from the north of England.” So far, he’s interrogated Nick Quantrill, Sheila Quigley, and Julie Lewthwaite, with more to come.

• You would think that if you were governor of one of the U.S. states, even a right-wing chief executive, you’d at least be willing to tell the truth. But apparently not in the cases of Arizona’s Jan Brewer and New Jersey’s Chris Christie.

• Things seem to be settling down on the set of Tom Selleck’s new police series, Blue Bloods, after troubles were reported last month.

• Wow, I thought this odd TV show from the late 1980s would never make the transition to DVD. It just proves again that one should not give up hope in these matters.

• A fascinating tidbit from the tragic story of “Custer’s Last Stand.”

• And why did thriller writer John le Carré (aka David Cornwall) refuse to meet with notorious British double agent Kim Philby, a decision that “likely” played a part in ending Cornwall’s own career as “a British agent for both MI5 and MI6”? The author--whose new Le Carré novel, Our Kind of Traitor, will be published in the UK this month and in the States in October--shares that episode from his past with The Daily Telegraph. (Hat tip to The Deighton Dossier.)