Worth Mentioning

• Ian Rankin is quoted by The Star, in Sheffield, England, as joking that he was nervous in the run-up to this month’s UK release of In a House of Lies (Orion), his 22nd John Rebus novel. “When it’s published,” he told the newspaper, “suddenly you get a flood of people who’ve read it and of course now, thanks to social media, they can immediately let you know what they think.” In a House of Lies is due out in late December in the States, from Little, Brown.

• With her new standalone suspense novel, The Witch Elm (Viking), set to appear in bookstores early next week, Dublin fictionist Tana French talks with New York magazine’s pop-culture Web site, Vulture, about “how to write a red herring.”

• Yikes! John D. Macdonald’s 1960 novel The End of the Night is “cited as one of his finest stand-alone novels,” and I have never even read it. Obviously, that situation must be remedied.

• Having watched the trailer for The Cry, a four-part British/Australian crime drama starring Jenna Coleman (Victoria), I’m now very much looking forward to seeing the full program. Unfortunately, that might take awhile. Although The Cry—based on Helen FitzGerald’s 2013 novel of that same name—has already premiered in the UK, and is slated for showing Down Under sometime later this year, there’s still no firm date for its broadcast in the United States, as far as I can tell.

• Such a bookstore sign is especially relevant right now.

• Sadly, this probably won’t be the last we’ll see of such reprehensible characters in fiction. In its report on how Bath, England, resident Georgia Fancett “has picked up a £20,000 publishing contract with Century for her ‘hard-hitting’ police procedural, The Fifth Girl,” The Bookseller adds that Fancett’s story pairs “a gay detective, [Detective Inspector] Alice Warnes,” with “a lazy, Trump-loving bigot” of a police partner. It seems Donald Trump will only reinforce the worldwide cliché of the “ugly American.”

• Author and educator Sean Carswell writes in the Los Angeles Review of Books about how the early 20th-century West Virginia “coal mine wars” inspired James M. Cain to embark on a career penning crime fiction. (Hat tip to Mystery Fanfare.)

• James Bond and Aston Martins belong together.

• For the CrimeReads Web site, Sherry Thomas—author of the Charlotte Holmes series (The Hollow of Fear)—picks seven mystery tales and TV shows that she says “imbue their Sherlock Holmes reinterpretations with far greater emotional resonance” than Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories ever offered.

• And more author interviews worth exploring: MysteryPeople talks with George Pelecanos (The Man Who Came Uptown); Tom Leins quizzes Hector Duarte Jr. about his new short-story collection, Desperate Times Call; The Killing Times chats with Robert Olen Butler about Paris in the Dark, his fourth novel starring early 20th-century newspaper correspondent Christopher Marlowe “Kit” Cobb; and Rick Ollerman, my editor at Down & Out: The Magazine, answers six questions about the publication in Jim Harrington’s blog.