Back on the Beat

After an incredibly busy couple of weeks spent helping out at my neighborhood bookshop, followed by a pleasant Christmas weekend spent with my brother, Matt, playing Wii Golf and consuming his gourmet meals, it’s back to the blogging salt mines for yours truly. Here are a few newsy bits that recently caught my attention.

• Lawrence Block was making noises just a while back about slowing down in his writing. But as John Kenyon observes in his blog, Things I’d Rather Be Doing, “2011 is shaping up to be the biggest year for Block fans.” Not only has he “more fully opened the door of the vault that long protected his ancient, pseudonymous work,” but “he has inked a deal with Open Road Media to sell e-Books of many of his titles.”

• The Winter 2010/2011 issue of Mysterical-E has been posted. Contents include new short fiction by John M. Floyd, Libby Cudmore, B.J. Bourg, and Karyne Corum; an interview with Peggy Ehrhart (Got No Friend Anyhow); and Gerald So’s list of his five favorite TV debuts of the year (one of which--Terriers--has already been cancelled).

• My wife might not consider this good news, but I do: The Mannix: Fourth Season DVD boxed set is due in stores come January 4.

• Thank you to Dan Fleming of My Year in Crime for naming The Rap Sheet as one of the “Best of the Year--Crime on the Web” sites.

• Author J.D. Rhoades takes a (wise)crack at predicting what ups and downers the next dozen months will bring.

• Seth Harwood has posted the fifth, final, and long-delayed episode of his latest Jack Palms tale, Triad Death March. Click here to listen.

• Stars Michael Cudlitz and Ben McKenzie talk about the third season of TNT-TV’s Southland, which will begin on Tuesday, January 4. Watch here.

• The Thrilling Detective’s Kevin Burton Smith offers a list of his “Favorite P.I. Things of 2010.” It includes his statement that Kalinda Sharma (Archie Panjabi), the “savvy, leather-wrapped” staff investigator on the popular CBS-TV legal drama The Good Wife, is “not just the most interesting character on the show--she’s the best private eye on the tube these days, a real throwback to the genre’s roots, Hammett-cold and Race Williams-tough.”

• On the National Public Radio Web site, novelist Anjanette Delgado writes in praise of “the clueless detective,” using three recent books to make her point. (Hat tip to Murder, Mystery & Mayhem.)

• There have been plenty of “trumped-up pseudo-scandals” circulating among hysterical right-wingers over the last year. But such folks have reached a new, idiotic low with allegations that President Obama’s support of the United Nations’ non-binding “Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People” will open “a path for the return of ancient tribal lands to American Indians, including even parts of Manhattan.” Seriously, folks, how stupid do such rumormongers believe Americans are, that they think we’d fall for such patent hogwash?

• Is the long-esteemed Arts & Letters Daily doomed?

• Libby Fischer Hellmann casts the someday-maybe film adaptation of her latest novel, Set the Night on Fire. How about Natalie Portman as protagonist Lila Hilliard?

• Michael Connelly has finally ended his long-running battle with Paramount Pictures over the movie and TV rights to his main protagonist, Harry Bosch. And believe it or not, Connelly came out the winner.