Reading, Writing, and Remembering

This being International Literary Day, it’s only right that we should pay attention to stories in the media having to do with books and reading. There are lots of those, plus other items worthy of attention:

• Declan Burke has posted an article in his blog that originally appeared in the Irish Examiner. In it, he asks “Val McDermid, John Banville, Colin Bateman, Stuart Neville, and Eoin McNamee why they believe Stieg Larsson became such a runaway phenomenon, and what they think of his work themselves.”

• Naomi Johnson has announced the winner of her recent “Gimme Five Contest,” which asked readers to name “five [crime-fiction] authors who you believe are an unfairly guarded secret.” In the course of it, she recaps the wide range of responses.

• Speaking of crime fictionists who’ve been denied their due ...

• Oh, goody: “The enduring mystery of why men rarely flatter themselves when they take to the dance floor may finally have been solved.” (Hat tip to Bill Crider’s Pop Culture Magazine.)

• The noir-fiction magazine Needle will serialize the new Ray Banks novel, Wolf Tickets, over its coming three issues.

• Wow, I didn’t know that Bonanza creator David Dortort was still alive. Now I’m sorry to hear that he’s passed away at age 93. More here.

• Stupid pollsters, but good for Andy Griffith.

• I don’t usually watch the silly series Psych (even if it does star West Wing alumnus Dulé Hill), but its upcoming tribute to the quirky 1990s show Twin Peaks might get me to actually try tuning in once more.

• Robin Jarossi, in his new Shots column, looks forward to the new, third season of Law & Order: UK.

• How I miss New England Monthly ...

• Tana French supplies Bookdagger with some background about her latest novel, Faithful Place. “In a lot of ways,” she writes, “Faithful Place is a love song to Dublin--both the tight-knit, scrappy Dublin of the ’80s and the confused, shell-shocked Dublin of today. It’s my home, to the extent that an international brat can really claim anywhere as home, and I love it, in every incarnation.”

• Meanwhile, in the trailer for her own new book, Trail of Blood, Lisa Black recounts the history of Cleveland, Ohio’s “Torso Killer,” a never-nabbed serial murderer of the 1930s. Watch that trailer here.

• Sons of Spade interviews author and blogger Bill Crider.

• And in Moment magazine, Walter Mosley “talks about his Jewish and black heritage, why he invents black heroes (not Jewish ones) and his controversial belief that Jews are a non-white ‘race’ unto themselves.”