Scouting the Blogosphere

• My friend and fellow critic Adam Woog passes along a line from Anthony Lane’s review of the movie Sinister in last week’s New Yorker magazine. Lane describes true crime as a “shapeless and often shameless genre which is to good crime fiction what pornography is to romance.” To which Woog remarks, “Amen, brother!”

• Author Max Allan Collins provides photographic evidence that he attended this month’s Bouchercon in Cleveland, Ohio.

• Blogger Jen Forbus offers her own particular memories of Bouchercon 2012, here and here.

• And for all those crime-fiction fans who didn’t make it to Cleveland, Peter Rozovsky notes that “VW Tapes is once again selling CDs and MP3s of Bouchercon panels.” At least you can listen to many of the author presentations and discussions.

• Sometime January Magazine contributor Jack Curtin reminds me that it was 50 years ago today that President John F. Kennedy was alerted to the fact that the Soviet Union had secretly delivered missiles to Cuba--the beginning of a 13-day international confrontation that history remembers as the Cuban Missile Crisis.

• One of the all-time-best music-video mash-ups.

• For anybody who hasn’t yet sampled Philip Kerr’s award-winning succession of historical thrillers featuring onetime Berlin police detective Bernie Gunther, Crime Fiction Lover’s David Prestidge provides a good overview of those books.

• And Randy Johnson proclaims that the 1947 motion picture The Brasher Doubloon--based loosely on Raymond Chandler’s The High Window (1942)--is “not a bad film, a tight little mystery” that “only suffers when compared to other Marlowe films, notably Bogart’s turn in The Big Sleep.” For a look at the range of movies made from Chandler’s books, simply click here.