Assorted Treats

• Patti Abbott’s latest flash-fiction challenge asks writers to come up with 800-word stories containing the line “I really don’t mind the scars.” The deadline is Monday, February 28. Full details here.

• During this last weekend’s Love Is Murder conference in Chicago, Julie Hyzy’s Grace Under Pressure won the Lovey Award for Best Traditional Mystery category. Rhys Bowen’s Royal Spyness series picked up the prize for Best Mystery Series. (Hat tip to Mystery Fanfare.) UPDATES: Omnimystery News has the full list of Lovey Award winners. And Publishers Weekly offers more coverage of the convention.

• The 10th season of Law & Order: Criminal Intent finally has a start date. It’s Sunday, May 1, on the USA Network. Vincent D’Onofrio is expected to return as troubled Detective Robert Goren, with Kathryn Erbe coming back as Detective Alexandra Eames. May 1 also happens to be the premiere date for the fourth season opener of USA’s In Plain Sight, starring Mary McCormack and Fred Weller.

• Meanwhile, Justified, the FX-TV series based around Elmore Leonard’s fictional character, U.S. Marshal Raylan Givens, will return for its second season, beginning tomorrow night at 10 p.m. ET/PT.

• From Elizabeth Foxwell’s blog, The Bunburyist: “University of Delaware’s Thomas Leitch, author of Perry Mason and long associated with Kirkus, discusses the 1957–66 TV program on KUSP’s From the Bookshelf with Gary Shapiro, comparing it to The Defenders (with E. G. Marshall) and providing insights on its appeal.” It’s a fascinating program that you can listen to here.

• I mentioned late last week that BBC Radio 4 has put together 90-minute weekend dramatizations of all of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe novels, the first of which--adapting The Big Sleep--can be heard here. But author Mark Coggins (The Big Wake-Up) points me as well to the Beeb’s 45-minute “Afternoon Play” imagining the difficult efforts by Raymond Chandler and writer-director Billy Wilder to create the screenplay of Double Indemnity, based on James M. Cain’s 1943 novella of the same title. Star Trek: The Next Generation’s Patrick Stewart plays Chandler! You can listen to the show right here.

• French blogger Xavier Lechard has finally posted the third and concluding installment of his fine series recalling crime fiction’s “Golden Ages,” this new one covering the period 1939-1950. All three parts can be accessed from this post.

• Work on the newest edition of Out of the Gutter, the “U.S. vs. UK” issue, has been completed and the mag is ready for purchase.

• Shout! Factory’s Season 5 release of Ironside, the NBC-TV series starring Raymond Burr, has been tentatively scheduled for May 17.

• And while searching around the Web recently, looking for something entirely unrelated, I stumbled across this Flickr set of pulp covers. It’s definitely a “big deal” worth sharing.