Ear to the Ground

• This morning’s e-mail brought the following news from Linda Pendleton, wife of the late author Don Pendleton:

I want to announce the publication of Richard S. Prather’s final Shell Scott private eye novel, The Death Gods, October 10, 2011, in Kindle, and [it] will be in print at Amazon in about two weeks. I also plan to have it via Smashwords soon.

Happy-go-lucky, Los Angeles private eye Shell Scott bulldozes his way through thugs, often with light-hearted humor, and with a beauty or two along the way, in this final novel of the long-running Shell Scott series by Richard S. Prather. More than 40 million copies of Richard S. Prather's hard-boiled Shell Scott mysteries have been sold in the U.S., with millions more world-wide since Shell Scott first appeared in 1950. Richard S. Prather (1921-2007) received the Private Eye Writers of America Lifetime Achievement Award in 1986.

Previous entries in the Shell Scott series are listed here.

• The second season of Sherlock, BBC One’s updated version of Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, is finally slated to reach Americans as part of PBS-TV’s Masterpiece Mystery! series, beginning on May 6 of next year. Three episodes will be shown.

• What’s the difference between “mysteries” and “thrillers”? Author and publisher Jim Huang tries to make some distinctions.

• Still more Icelandic crime novels are on their way to translation.

• Kathleen George extols the virtues of tension-filled conversations between killers and their anticipated victims in crime fiction.

• NBC has extended the seasons of Harry’s Law and Prime Suspect.

• Here’s a cool e-book short-story collection for you.

• For the Mulholland Books site, Kate Atkinson interviews fellow author Denise Mina (The End of the Wasp Season).

• And the movie Web site Flick Attack has now reviewed all six of the classic Thin Man films, starring William Powell and Myrna Loy. It makes me want to see those pictures again, even the lesser ones.