From Far Corners of the Blogosphere

• Should his success with the new Sherlock Holmes novel, The House of Silk, inspire other authors to follow in his path, Anthony Horowitz has put together a list, appropriately, of “Ten Rules for Writing a Sherlock Holmes Novel.” My personal fave is No. 7:

It’s quite difficult to pastiche nineteenth century English in a way that won’t put off twenty-first century readers, particularly younger ones. I have to say that I plucked quite a few words out of the original stories to act as guideposts, to give the text a sense of authenticity. My favourites are: ‘snibbed’, ‘foeman’, ‘sickish’ (used by Lestrade) and ‘passementerie’. That said, the book is actually being written in around 1916 and I would imagine that by this time Watson’s own language and writing style would have become more modern.

• I have some good memories of the 1981-1986 ABC-TV series The Fall Guy, mostly because it featured Heather Thomas in skimpy attire. But is it necessary to adapt that show for the big screen?

• While we’re on the subject of boob-tube beauties, Retrospace has posted its second collection of “Lesser Known TV Babes.” This set includes Karen Valentine, probably best remembered for her role on the series Room 222, but also noteworthy for her bikini-clad appearance in the 1974 TV film The Girl Who Came Gift-Wrapped. Retrospaces’s previous set of “Lesser Known TV Babes” is here.

• Save the apostrophe!

• This is intriguing, but hardly conclusive: “An author has uncovered a six-inch blade--which he believes was the one used by Victorian serial killer Jack the Ripper,” reports Britain’s The Sun newspaper. “Tony Williams found the knife amongst the possessions of his distant relative Sir John Williams, a chief suspect in the murders. The brutal attacks saw five prostitutes butchered in London’s East End between August and November 1888. Sir John was working as a surgeon to Queen Victoria at the time, but left London soon after the slayings.”

• How to fight like Star Trek’s Captain Kirk.

• For many of us, this story doesn’t exactly live up to its headline--“10 Things You Probably Don’t Know About [James] Bond”--but there are a couple of facts with which I was not familiar. Danger Man star Patrick McGoohan turned down the Bond role because he thought Ian Fleming’s character was “too promiscuous”? Really?

• Speaking of Agent 007, The Daily Mail today brings word that Daniel Craig’s shapely co-stars in the next Bond film, Skyfall, will be French actress Bérénice Marlohe and British star Naomie Harris. Am I the only one to ask in both cases, Who? (Hat tip to The HMSS Weblog.)

• This looks like a bad idea, if we want to support public libraries.

• Strangely, this list of “History’s 10 Most Famous Criminal Duos” doesn’t include William Burke and William Hare, who killed more than a dozen people in Edinburgh, Scotland, during the early 19th century in order to provide corpses for medical dissection.

• And there’s trouble ahead for partisan obstructists: A new Suffolk University poll found that even “a quarter of all Republicans and a third of all conservatives” in the United States believe “Republicans are intentionally stalling efforts to jumpstart the economy to insure that Barack Obama is not re-elected.”