Sunday, October 02, 2011

Little Big Shots

Having tried myself to put together a regular, once-a-month-only column of crime-fiction news (that is, after all, the format in which The Rap Sheet started out), I know the difficulty of the job facing British reviewer, author, and bon vivant Mike Ripley. Yet he demonstrates much greater success in completing that task than I ever did.

His latest “Getting Away with Murder” column for Shots is a scatter-shot collection of notes that takes in Anthony Horowitz’s forthcoming Sherlock Holmes novel, The House of Silk; Margery Allingham’s 1934 novel, Death of a Ghost, and Rex Stout’s The Black Mountain (1954); new works by Ian Rankin, Tom Egeland, and Tony Park; a reminder of Malcolm Gair’s yarns about British private eye Mark Raeburn; U.S. author Ed Gorman’s big award win at September’s Bouchercon; and the revelation that “Sam Eastland,” the pseudonymous author of the popular Inspector Pekkala thriller (including Siberian Red, due out in February 2012), is really Paul Watkins, an American “who has been turning out varied but always excellent novels for twenty years or more.”

You can read all of Ripley’s new Shots column here.

1 comment:

Barbara said...

Fascinating news about the "real" Sam Eastland. I read the first Pekkala novel and am anxious to read the rest.