Running the Gamut

• Mike Ripley’s “Getting Away with Murder” column for May includes notes about a month-long rolling blog tribute to author Reginald Hill (who passed away in January); Elizabeth Wilson’s “disgracefully overlooked” historical work, The Girl in Berlin; the “remarkably good” UK TV series Scott & Bailey; Belgian author Patrick Conrad’s soon-forthcoming detective novel, No Sale; more thematic similarities in book cover design, and considerably more. Click here to read Ripley’s round-up of news from the crime-fiction sphere.

• We haven’t even reached opening day of the 2013 Left Coast Crime convention (to be held next March in Colorado Springs, Colorado), but already there’s chatter spreading about Left Coast Crime 2014, which is set to take place in Monterey, California, from March 20 to 23 of that year. Hmm. It’s been a few years since I was last in historic Monterey. Maybe a return trip is in order ...

• Meanwhile, In Reference to Murder alerts me to another upcoming (in November) conference titled Crime Fiction--Here and There, Now and Then. It’s only too bad the event will be taking place at the University of Gdansk, Poland. That’s maybe a little too far away to be manageable within my 2013 travel budget.

• For a nice nostalgic escape, click over to Booksteve’s Library, where you’ll find the full video of “Murder by the Barrel,” the first regular episode (from September 29, 1971) of McMillan & Wife.

• In the wake of this last weekend’s CrimeFest, the blog Euro Crime has been posting interviews conducted with some of the author attendees. Here is Janet Laurence’s conversation with Swedish writers Anders Roslund and Börge Hellström. And click here to find Peter Guttridge’s conversation with Lee Child.

• For those who haven’t noticed, Lee Child has a new Jack Reacher story in the June/July issue of Esquire magazine. It’s called “Everyone Talks.” Sorry, but it’s not available for free online.

• By the way, Ayo Onatade has concluded her postings about this year’s CrimeFest. They’re available here, here, here, and here.

• Mignon G. Eberhart makes a comeback in e-books!

• For the last month, blogger Rick29 at the Classic Film and TV Café has been posting his choices of the “15 Greatest TV Characters of the 1960s.” About half of them are associated with crime or mystery series, including Barney Collier of Mission: Impossible, Richard Kimble of The Fugitive, Emma Peel of The Avengers, and Have Gun--Will Travel’s Paladin. All 15 write-ups can be enjoyed here.

• Best-selling author Stephen King, who published The Colorado Kid through Hard Case Crime back in 2005, returns to that paperback house with Joyland, a book set to appear in July 2013. “Set in a small-town North Carolina amusement park in 1973,” Hard Case editor Charles Ardai explains, “Joyland tells the story of the summer in which college student Devin Jones comes to work as a carny and confronts the legacy of a vicious murder, the fate of a dying child, and the ways both will change his life forever.”

• Steve Thompson picks his “10 favorite Columbo killers.” I’m very pleased to see Dick Van Dyke make that cut. He guest-starred in 1974’s “Negative Reaction,” one of my favorite episodes of the Peter Falk series, playing a homicidal photographer.

• Author Max Allan Collins announces the September release of his book-length collection of From the Files of ... Mike Hammer, a 1953-1954 newspaper comic strip that was written by Mickey Spillane and illustrated by Ed Robbins. Collins features the book’s quite wonderful cover on his Web site.

• This coming summer’s schedule for PBS-TV’s Masterpiece Mystery! series includes fresh (at least in the States) episodes of Inspector Lewis and Wallander, plus the 90-minute pilot for Endeavour, a prequel to Colin Dexter’s popular Inspector Morse stories that has already won a first-season order from ITV. Let’s hope the Endeavour series also makes it to PBS sometime in the near future.

• This is very sad news for Los Angeles.

• CBS-TV has finally pulled the plug on Tom Selleck’s TV movie series about small-town police chief Jesse Stone (a character created by Robert B. Parker) for the very same reason NBC recently killed Harry’s Law: low ratings among advertiser-prized 18-49 year-olds.

• Revolting! Republicans want to raise student loan interest rates in order that they can afford to hand out more hefty tax breaks to America’s wealthiest citizens.

• Don’t we all deserve Yvonne Craig’s Batgirl on our computer screens? Are you with me here, folks?

• And this may not be a good idea: “Lifetime Television is ... developing a series around FBI profiler Clarice Starling, introduced in [Thomas Harris’] second Hannibal Lecter thriller, the 1988 novel The Silence of the Lambs ...,” reports Omnimystery News. “Clarice--the tentative name for the Lifetime series--would follow the character soon after she graduates from the FBI academy.” Maybe Lifetime could recruit Jodie Foster to play Clarice’s mother. Oh, never mind.