Sunday Snacks

• It looks as if the widely publicized campaign to reunite the cold ashes of author Raymond Chandler with those of his elder wife, Cissy (who died in 1954, five years before he breathed his last), in San Diego, California, has finally succeeded. There’s more on that story here.

• Noomi Rapace, the Swedish actress who did such a kick-ass job playing feminist avenger Lisbeth Salander in the original film versions of Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire, has reportedly been cast as the female lead in Sherlock Holmes II, the sequel to the 2009 Robert Downey Jr./Jude Law action thriller.

• Chapter 2 of Dick Adler’s new serial novel, Forget About It, has now been posted in the Knowledgeable Blogger.

• The third episode in the latest run of Inspector Lewis mysteries, “Dark Matter,” will be broadcast this evening on PBS-TV’s Masterpiece Mystery! series. Check your local listings for times and channels.

• This sounds like a book for me.

• Regular book publishers often do a poor job of coming up with original artwork, but the new field of e-books is proving to be much worse in that regard. This cover for the Kindle electronic edition of Fletcher Flora’s 1954 short story “Heels Are for Hating” was lifted straight from the front of Stanley Ellin’s fabulous 1958 novel, The Eighth Circle. The illustration was done, of course, by Robert McGinnis.

• The latest short-story offering in Beat to a Pulp is a western-mystery crossover called “The Wanted Man,” by Matthew Pizzolato, editor of the e-zine The Western Online.

• Here’s your chance to appear in a Reed Farrel Coleman novel.

• Are you up for the 2010-2011 Canadian Book Challenge?

• “Ladies and gentlemen, the story you are about to hear is true. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent.” Those famous lines introduced Jack Webb’s TV series, Dragnet. But they were originally part of Webb’s 1949-1957 radio series of the same name. There are now dozens of episodes of radio’s Dragnet available for your listening pleasure on the Web. Click here to listen. (Hat tip to Murder, Mystery & Mayhem.)

• And here’s some Webb trivia for you: At the time of his death by heart attack in 1982, the actor-producer was evidently working on a TV revival of Dragnet, which would have co-starred Kent McCord of Adam-12 fame. Not until 2003 did Dragnet actually re-appear on the small screen, under the supervision of Law & Order honcho Dick Wolf.

• Congratulations to Crime Scraps and its master, British writer Uriah Robinson (aka Norman Price). That blog turns four years old today.

• Another blog worth following: Murder by Gaslight.

• As part of its Underground Reading series, the blog Pornokitsch has lately been reviewing a lot of John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee novels.

• The Tainted Archive is in the midst of its John Wayne Tribute Weekend. Most of the posts have had to do with Wayne’s western films, but Los Angeles police officer and blogger Paul Bishop adds to those with an entry today about Wayne’s cop pictures, McQ and Brannigan. By the way, you’ll find the famous Seattle car chase sequence from McQ here.

• Parody is the sincerest form of flattery.

• I hadn’t remembered that the 1968 U.S. presidential race pitting sitting Vice President Hubert Humphrey against former veep Richard Nixon had been quite so close.

• Don Johnson continues to make millions from the 1996-2001 CBS-TV police procedural, Nash Bridges.

• Gerald Elias submits his second Daniel Jacobus mystery, Danse Macabre, to Marshal Zeringue’s Page 69 Test. The results are here.

• A wealth of Richard Stark book covers.

• And I don’t know when this was originally posted, but the Masterpiece Mystery! Web site offers overviews and interviews focusing on crime novelists from all over the world. Among those writers are Robert Wilson, Colin Cotterill, Karin Fossum, Leonardo Padura, and Garry Disher. (Hat tip to Author Interviews.)