Bullet Points: Snow Day Edition*

• Less than a week remains now in the submission process for 2012’s Debut Dagger competition, hosted by the British Crime Writers’ Association. The deadline is Saturday, January 21. As the CWA’s Web site explains, “The Debut Dagger is open to anyone who has not yet had a novel published commercially. ... Winning the Debut Dagger doesn’t guarantee you’ll get published. But it does mean your work will be seen by leading agents and top editors, who have signed up over two dozen winners and shortlisted Debut Dagger competitors.” Click here for more information about entering the contest.

• DC Comics is adapting Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo as a two-volume graphic novel, the first volume to be released in November 2012. As Omnimystery News reports, “The story is by Denise Mina and Leonardo Manco with art by Andrea Mutti.” But the real treat, I think, is the cover of that first graphic novel, featuring a powerful illustration by Lee Bermejo. Click on the image at left for a blowup. And clickety-clack here to see Bermejo’s original Tattoo art.

• “The Reichenbach Fall,” the third and final 90-minute episode in the second season of Sherlock, BBC-TV’s updated version of the famous Sherlock Holmes stories, will be broadcast this evening in Great Britain. This same sophomore season of Sherlock is set to show in the States as part of PBS-TV’s Masterpiece Mystery! series, beginning on May 6.

• Meanwhile, Tor.com’s Teresa Jusino takes a look back at the work of Sidney Paget, the Victorian artist who created our enduring images of Sherlock Holmes, Doctor John Watson, and so many other of Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional players.

• Happy birthday to Muhammad Ali (born Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr.). The former American heavyweight boxing champ will turn 70 years old this coming Tuesday.

• GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich’s 30-minute film attacking Mitt Romney as a “corporate raider” and job killer was pretty damning of the one-term former Massachusetts governor. But a new ad put together by Romney’s latest (faux) rival, Stephen Colbert of Comedy Central, in the run-up to South Carolina’s January 21 Republican primary election, is certainly more clever. As the blog Boing Boing explains, it “points out that Mitt Romney says ‘corporations are people,’ but he also made his fortune as a raider buying up, gutting, and killing corporations. Conclusion: Mitt ‘the Ripper’ Romney is a serial killer.” Watch it here.

• Blogger-author Paul D. Brazill talks with Michael Haskins about the latter’s recent paperback thriller, Stairway to the Bottom.

• In his latest podcast interview, Jeff Rutherford chats with Peter Spiegelman, the author of Red Cat (2007) and Thick As Thieves, one of January Magazine’s favorite crime novels of 2011.

• Rick Mofina tells the Calgary Herald that his new novel, The Burning Edge, “was ‘inspired’ by [a] 1998 crime and other robberies he had covered” as a newspaper reporter.

• Unbelievable! First, The Killing--the AMC-TV crime drama adapted from a popular Danish police procedural--failed, after a strong start and 13 episodes, to reveal who was responsible for the teenager’s  murder at the very core of its plot, turning former fans irate at the prospect of having to sit through a second season of the show to finally learn the answer to that mystery. And now we hear that The Killing will return to AMC on April 1, but that the murderer still won’t be revealed until the Season 2 finale. Do network execs really believe many people are still going to be watching by then?

• Tonight brings the season conclusion of Leverage, TNT-TV’s series about a group of modern-day Robin Hoods led by Timothy Hutton. This episode, titled “The Last Dam Job,” will begin at 9 p.m. ET/PT.

• And one final TV note, courtesy of Omnimystery News: “A&E plans a prequel series to the classic Alfred Hitchcock thriller Psycho. An original scripted drama titled Bates Motel, the series would be centered on Norman Bates, and provide a back story into how he came to become the character we’ve all seen in the film.”

* Yes, that’s right: Seattleites are in the midst of the city’s first snowfall of 2012, with more of the white stuff expected over the next two days. Yippee!