Once Around the Blog Block

• This is the final day of Gerald So’s “30 Days of the 5-2 Blog Tour,” which has been celebrating National Poetry Month, crime-fiction-oriented verse, and So’s own blog, The 5-2, ever since the beginning of April. If you haven’t been following closely, rest assured: You can find links to all of the associated posts here.

• Check out The Thrilling Detective’s list of 14 “brilliant but cancelled” TV private-eye TV series, which includes The Outsider, City of Angels, Leg Work, and Tenspeed and Brown Shoe.

• Mr. Poe’s deservedly forgotten mystery?

• What a funny and downright wonderful idea for a blog: The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks. I wish I’d thought of it.

• Turning murder into a tourism draw.

• I’d wondered what ever became of Edgar Award winner Wendy Hornsby ... It seems all five of her Maggie MacGowen novels and two of her Kate and Tejeda books have recently been re-released as e-books by The Mysterious Press.

• And at the Mysterious Press site, Gary Phillips recalls what led him to write Violent Springs (1994), his first Ivan Monk novel.

• This last weekend brought the 45th anniversary of Expo 67, the often elegantly designed Montreal world’s fair that first got me interested in such events--both modern and historical.

• Still holding out for that storied Matt Helm movie ...

• The latest issue of Mystery Readers Journal focuses on stories set in France, and includes an essay by J. Robert Janes, whose long-awaited 13 book featuring World War II-era investigators Hermann Kohler and Jean-Louis St-Cyr, Bellringer, is set to be released on June 5. Kohler and St-Cyr first appeared in Mayhem (1992).

• “The most belligerent newspaper apology ever?”

• For the Mystery*File blog, Josef Hoffmann chooses what he says are “the 12 best essays on crime fiction.” They include Raymond Chandler’s “The Simple Art of Murder,” Ross Macdonald’s “The Writer As Detective Hero,” and Stephen King’s “Warning! Warning! Hitchhikers May Be Escaped Lunatics!” (that last piece being a “very direct and frank, rather personal, full insight into Jim Thompson’s work from the viewpoint of a famous storyteller”).

• Investigating Nancy Drew’s late mother.

• Did you know that David Simon, creator of the HBO-TV series The Wire (in addition to being author Laura Lippman’s husband), is now composing a blog called The Audacity of Despair?

• The 10 most corrupt movie cops?

• Last spring, the blog Tipping My Fedora produced an idiosyncratic list of the top 100 mystery novels of all time. Now, blogger Yvette Banek has published a rundown of “101 Favorite Mysteries and/or Thrillers.” The temptation to assemble my own such list is tempting, but as I’ve written before, it would be no easy task.

• Patrick deWitt’s western-flavored crime novel, The Sisters Brothers, has won this year’s Oregon Book Award for Fiction.

• President Obama learns to make right-wing craziness work for him.

• The Pulp Factory, “an Internet group made up of over one hundred pulp enthusiasts, some professional writers and artists,” handed out its third annual Pulp Factor Awards in Chicago over the weekend.

• Here’s the schedule for the 10th Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, slated to take place in Harrogate, England, from July 19 to 22. Sigh ... I wish I could go.

• Jack Balestreri, “believed to have been the last survivor of the thousands of workers who built” San Francisco’s iconic Golden Gate Bridge, died earlier this month at age 95.

• And get those DVD player ready! The complete runs of Yancy Derringer (1958-1959) and 87th Precinct (1961-1962) are both due out in stores this coming August.