Just a Few Things Worth Knowing

• Good on star Kristen Bell and show creator Rob Thomas for raising $2 million in less than a day though Kickstarter--money to finance the production of a feature-film follow-up to the 2004-2007 TV series Veronica Mars. That picture is expected to be released early in 2014. (UPDATE: Wired has more to say on this subject here.)

• In advance of the return of Foyle’s War, Acorn Media has re-released DVD versions of the first six seasons of that popular World War II-era mystery series. Also on sale is a collector’s edition of the entire series thus far, Foyle’s War: The Home Front Files. According to an Acorn press release, Foyle’s War, starring Michael Kitchen and Honeysuckle Weeks, will return to PBS-TV’s Masterpiece Mystery! this coming September with three new episodes. Hot diggity!

• Look for two newly released e-books by sometime Rap Sheet contributors: Gary Phillips’ The Essex Man: 10 Seconds to Death is an action-adventure novella introducing Luke Warfield (“part Shaft and part Batman sans the costume”) and boasting a fabulous cover by Carlos Valenzuela; while The Big O is the e-book reprint of Irish author Declan Burke’s first “screwball noir” novel.

• Phillips has more to say about black pulp fiction here.

• Kristopher Zgorski of BOLO Books recently interviewed Dana Cameron about her new Fangborn novel, Seven Kinds of Hell.

• For his blog, Woodcuttingfool, Los Angeles woodcut artist Loren Kantor has created a variety of original prints inspired by classic works of film noir. Among the more famous faces you’ll find on that site are those of Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Peter Lorre, Jack Palance, and Edward G. Robinson.

• A preliminary schedule for this year’s Malice Domestic conference in Bethesda, Maryland (May 3-5), has been released.

• And this was definitely one of my odder dreams.