Bullet Points: Daylight Savings Time Edition

• January Magazine has begun posting holiday gift suggestions from its editors. My write-up about The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories, edited by Otto Penzler, appears on the site today.

• This announcement was made during Bouchercon in San Francisco, but I forgot to mention it. So did blogger Jen Forbus. As she writes:

... a tribute anthology is being compiled for [publisher and bookstore co-owner] David Thompson [who died in mid-September]. This is going to be one heck of an anthology, folks. It’ll be published by Busted Flush Press, which is now an imprint of Tyrus Books. There will be contributions from the likes of Michael Connelly, Dennis Lehane, Lee Child, Don Winslow, Daniel Woodrell, Ken Bruen and many more. Brad Meltzer will write the introduction and Reed Farrel Coleman and Alison Janssen will edit the collection.

This book will first come out as a leather-bound limited edition signed by all the authors. That will be [in] the early fall of 2011. Then at Bouchercon in St. Louis, a trade paperback edition will be available. I’ll remind you as the release date draws closer, but you can also sign up to receive e-mail updates on the project here. The stories and work on this book will be donated. Aside from production costs, all proceeds will go to “satisfy David’s remaining obligations, to fund a scholarship in David’s name, and to establish an award in David’s name for Best First Novel from an independent publisher.”

• This week’s new short story in Beat to a Pulp, East Coast writer Kieran Shea’s “The Takedown Heart,” is the 100th such offering since that Webzine debuted in December 2008.

• After lots of back-and-forth regarding this famous franchise’s future, word now has it that the next James Bond film--number 23--will be released in November 2012. Its production may go ahead, though, without Daniel Craig in the starring role.

• More about Manhunt magazine from Bare•bones’ Peter Enfantino.

• Being a longtime fan of actor Gene Barry, I’m going to have to track down the “small, fun, campy” 1958 film, Hong Kong Confidential.

• On the other hand, I think I’ll skip this flick.

• I’ve been watching the rebooted Hawaii Five-O ever since it debuted back in September. And while I have been lightly amused by the bickering between stars Alex O’Loughlin and Scott Caan, and continue to enjoy seeing Grace Park in a bikini, that CBS show just isn’t delivering sufficient novelty for my taste. However, my opinion apparently represents the minority, as Heather Havrilesky makes clear in Salon. With its familiar theme song, panning shots of ocean waves and beaches, and enough violence to kept stunt men in clover for a good long while, Hawaii Five-O “is what hit TV looks like,” Havrilesky insists.

• Less fortunate is Undercovers, starring Boris Kodjoe and the lovely Gugu Mbatha-Raw as a married couple who split their time between their catering biz and spying for the CIA. Created by J.J. Abrams (Alias, Lost), and offering style, sexual suggestiveness, and humor, Undercovers seemed to have great assets. But its 8-9 p.m. timeslot and unremarkable plots prevented the show from becoming a hit. NBC has now canceled Undercovers, after ordering four additional scripts just last month.

• Author Denise Mina has a new graphic novel out?

• For what it’s worth, Amazon has already named its top 10 mysteries and thrillers for 2010. They are as follows:

1. Faithful Place, by Tana French
2. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest, by Stieg Larsson
3. The Passage, by Justin Cronin
4. Moonlight Mile, by Dennis Lehane
5. So Cold the River, by Michael Koryta
6. Full Dark, No Stars, by Stephen King
7. Worth Dying For, by Lee Child
8. Rock Paper Tiger, by Lisa Brackmann
9. Bury Your Dead, by Louise Penny
10. Horns, by Joe Hill

A few of those are solid choices, but none of them is unexpected. What can one expect from a site that benefits by flogging bestsellers?

• Publishers Weekly has released its own list of what it thinks are the 100 Best Books of 2010. As Janet Rudolph points out in Mystery Fanfare, “several mysteries are in the Fiction category, while most are in the Mystery category, and one is under Romance.” Here are PW’s choices:

The following novels are listed under Fiction:

-- Our Kind of Traitor, by John le Carré (Viking)
-- Faithful Place, by Tana French (Viking)
-- Invisible Boy, by Cornelia Read (Grand Central)
-- Innocent, by Scott Turow (Grand Central)
-- Years of Red Dust, by Qui Xiaolong (St. Martin’s)

The following novels are listed under Mystery:

-- The Man with the Baltic Stare, by James Church (Minotaur)
-- Love Songs from a Shallow Grave, by Colin Cotterill (Soho Crime)
-- Bleed a River Deep, by Brian McGilloway (Minotaur)
-- Bury Your Dead, by Louise Penny (Minotaur)
-- The Insane Train, by Sheldon Russell (Minotaur)
-- The Red Door, by Charles Todd (Morrow)

The following novel is listed under Romance:

-- The Iron Duke, by Meljean Brook (Berkley)

• Dennis Lehane picks his five favorite short-story collections.

• And Scott Turow chooses “the five best legal novels.”

• Although I’m a bit late with this, I want to express my sorrow over the recent deaths of Alex Anderson (who created Rocky and Bullwinkle and Dudley Do-Right) and presidential speechwriter Ted Sorenson.

• Hmm. Good to know.

• Bruce DeSilva, author of the debut novel, Rogue Island, recalls the influence Evan Hunter (Ed McBain) had on his writing career.

• Here’s your chance to become Janet Evanovich’s co-author.

• They just don’t make cool magazine covers like these anymore.

• I, for one, am pleased to see U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) pushing to become minority leader in the House again, now that Republicans have gained control over that lower chamber of Congress. She’s smart, feisty, and a good organizer, with a far better grasp of the issues than her coming GOP successor can claim. More on this news here, here, and here.

• Guess who Tom Selleck thinks should star in a film version of Magnum, P.I., if such a thing is ever made. You’ve got it: Tom Selleck.

• Two conversations worth checking out: John Harvey (Far Cry) chats in a video segment with French interviewer François Guérif, while Leighton Gage (Dying Gasp) fields questions from Jean Henry Mead.

• Finally, at the same time Forbes blogger Jeff Bercovici insists that blogging has become too demanding for hobbyist writers, who are turning instead to more abbreviated communications through Facebook and Twitter, The New York Times points out that long-form journalism still has “an online friend” in Longreads. That Web site collects and collates more in-depth pieces from The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Texas Monthly, Vanity Fair, and other sources, and gives readers an estimation of how long it will take them to get through each piece (based on the assumption that they can read 250 words per minute). For somebody like me, who doesn’t believe that everything on the Internet ought to be consumed with the same speed one can wolf down a doughnut, Longreads seems like a promising investment in literacy.