Bullet Points: First 2013 Edition

• If you’re lucky enough to be roaming the streets of London, England, on February 13, you will want to stop by the Victoria Library for this public discussion on historical crime and thriller fiction. One of the three speakers will be Shots columnist and author Mike Ripley.

• And on Tuesday, January 15--the 66th anniversary of the gruesome discovery, in Los Angeles, that gave birth to the durable Black Dahlia murder mystery--British crime-fiction scholar Steven Powell is scheduled to deliver an address in London titled “I Never Knew Her in Life: Cultural Depictions of the Black Dahlia Case.” That event will take place at St. Bartholomew’s Pathology Museum from 7 to 8:30p.m. Rap Sheet readers will remember Powell as the editor of both last year’s must-have resource, 100 American Crime Writers, and of Conversations with James Ellroy.

• The Private Eye Writers of America has announced that it will introduce a new category of Shamus Award in 2013, for the Best Indie P.I. Novel. PWA honchos have “decided it’s time to open the organization to self-published works as the category now includes many established authors who, for one reason or another, have decided to publish their own work.”

• Just when you thought you were done reading “best crime fiction of 2012” compilations, here come a few more. Spinetingler Magazine critics weigh in on the subject here. Jen Forbus has her say here. Ransom Notes’ Jedidiah Ayres presents his 10 “flat-out favorite novels of 2012” here. The Boston Globe’s Hallie Ephron offers up another 10 remarkable works, at the same time as Elizabeth A. White chooses 10 still different books (two of them by Chris F. Holm) here. John Kenyon’s list in Grift Magazine overlaps with some previous ones, while Jon Jordan of Crimespree Magazine expresses his own opinions here. In The House of Crime and Mystery, Jacques Filippi shares the results of his blog’s first Readers’ Choice Awards in the genre. Naomi Johnson honors more memorable books with the 2012 Lowhead Dam Awards. Kerrie Smith names her dozen favorite reads of last year, two of which come from her native Australia. At the Scene of the Crime’s Patrick Ohl offers a rundown of his top vintage-novel reads from the past 12 months, while blogger “dfordoom” tackles the same task here, and “TracyK” rolls out her first list of this sort in Bitter Tea and Mystery. The splendidly designated blog Battered, Tattered, Yellowed, & Creased catalogues its favorites in both the mystery-fiction and science-fiction fields, and adds a handful of “least-favorites” for balance. William I. Lengeman III takes his own broader approach, making note of the crime-fiction books and films he liked best in 2012. Patti Abbott has a similarly wide-ranging list here. Finally, author James Reasoner--who says he “read 112 books this year”--mixes mysteries, thrillers, and Westerns in his “favorites” post.

• Going beyond the bounds of those previous rundowns ... Sandra Seamans points out her 10 favorite crime short stories debuting online. Max Allan Collins tips his hat to his favorite and least favorite films of 2012. And David Abrams has posted what he’s convinced are the best opening lines of last year.

• I have found a new source for old TV shows and films.

• Seriously? Hawaii Five-O is planning a choose-your-own-ending episode? It may be a first for a prime-time TV series, but who cares. I’d rather see this show develop more depth in its storytelling and character development. These gimmicks just make me glad I stopped watching the H5-0 reboot midway through its first season.

• Congratulations are owed to The New York Review of Books. That fortnightly publication will turn 50 years old in February 2013.

• I’m pleased to see that Open Road Integrated Media is finally bringing back into circulation the “gritty, urban” police procedurals concocted by Dorothy Uhnak, who died in 2006. It is only too bad that those books, including the Christie Opara trilogy--which inspired the 1974-1975 TV series Get Christie Love! (see here and here)--will be available only as e-books, not in printed form.

• A lengthy excerpt in Salon shows us what to expect from Kinsey and Me: Stories, Sue Grafton’s collection of tales--due for release in the States this coming Tuesday--that reveal Kinsey [Millhone]’s origins and Sue’s past.” It’s only odd that this 30th anniversary work didn’t come out last year; after all, Grafton’s initial Kinsey novel, “A” Is for Alibi, was published in 1982.

• The third Kindle edition of ThugLit, which began as a free online crime-fiction publication, is now available for $0.99.

• Expect a James Bond tribute during next month’s Oscars show.

• Ben Boulden celebrates two newly released novellas starring Bill Pronzini’s Nameless Detective, both of which feature outstanding cover illustrations by Glen Orbik.

• Travel + Leisure’s list of “America’s Best Bookstores” might just as easily have been headlined “America’s Already Best-Known Bookstores.” I’ve visited the majority of these establishments at one time or another, and am not surprised to see any of them included here. But wouldn’t a more novel conception for the article have been nice? Personally, I’d have preferred to hear about great American bookshops that haven’t been so frequently publicized and that aren’t usually included in travelers’ itineraries. Such a focus might have had the added benefit of helping smaller but no less interesting book dealers stay in business. (Hat tip to Mystery Fanfare.)

• Continuing a theme: the world’s most beautiful bookstores.

• Criminal Element looks back at “crime-solving couples of yesteryear,” among them Agatha Christie’s Thomas and Prudence Beresford, and Stuart Palmer’s Hildegarde Withers and Oscar Piper.

• Via Facebook comes news that writer Christopher Mills and artist Rick Burchett will re-launch their hard-boiled comic series Gravedigger on the Web, beginning on February 4. Writes Mills: “We’ll be posting a page a week every Monday, starting with the original Gravedigger story, ‘The Scavengers’ (which hasn't been seen online or in print for years), and then serializing the new one ... ‘The Predators.’” He promises to announce the series’ Web address “when we get closer to the launch.” So far, Mills is using only a single, deliberately provocative image to promote this project--an illustration that reminds me of some book covers I’ve written about on this page before.

• Speaking of comics, did you ever expect to see a graphic novel featuring both monster hunter Carl Kolchak and curvaceous private eye Honey West? Yeah, I didn’t either. However, someone at Moonstone Books saw the potential in that match-up.

• Don Medford, a resourceful TV director whose credits included the pilot for The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (“The Vulcan Affair”) and the last, two-part episode of The Fugitive, died on December 12 in West Hills, California. He was 95 years old. A check through the International Movie Database (IMDb) finds that Medford also directed episodes of M Squad, The Streets of San Francisco, The F.B.I., City of Angels, Baretta, and Dynasty. (Hat tip to The HMSS Weblog.)

• Cheers to five years of Mysteries in Paradise.

• Alternet editors have published a list of the “12 most despicable things Fox News did in 2012,” but something tells me they started with way more than a dozen, and had to pare it down.

• Fans of the Martin Beck police procedurals, by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, will want to check out Sarah Ward’s growing catalogue of posts about that early Swedish detective series in Crimepieces.

• I’d never heard of the 1980 TV episonage-show pilot S*H*E until today, but it boasted a cool, James Bond-ish promotional poster painted by Robert McGinnis, who also produced the early promo art for the 007 pictures. Click here to learn more about this film starring Cornelia Sharpe, Omar Sharif, and Robert Lansing; and at least for the time being, you can watch the whole cheesy thing online here.

• And though it has nothing to do with mystery or thriller fiction, I want to remind all those Downton Abbey fans out there among my American readership that the historical drama’s third season premieres tonight on PBS-TV stations. Having watched this latest round of episodes already (thanks to a wonderful source), I can tell you that there’s much to expect in the way of surprises--both favorable and disappointing. Just don’t expect everyone who deserves his or her comeuppance to receive it.

Prime Crime

Well, I’ve finally done it: posted both parts of January Magazine’s “Best Books of 2012” crime-fiction coverage. Click here to read all of Part I; Part II can be found here.

This year January’s critics selected 30 novels for particular bepraisement, from Declan Burke’s Absolute Zero Cool and Tana French’s Broken Harbor to Don Winslow’s The Kings of Cool, Robert Rotenberg’s Stray Bullets, and Lyndsay Faye’s The Gods of Gotham. These books were released over the last 12 months in the Unites States, Britain,and Canada. Reading through the selections, it’s clear that the crime, mystery, and thriller genre offers a considerable range of storytelling and deserves its current popularity.

So, do you think we missed praising any crime novels? Please feel free to make your own “best of the year” recommendations in the Comments section of this post.

The Rest of the Best

If everything goes according to plan, I will begin posting January Magazine’s Best Books of 2012 selections in the crime-fiction category sometime this afternoon. Meanwhile, though, there are several other best-of-the-year rundowns worth checking out.

British reviewer Sarah Ward reveals her top five crime-fiction reads here. Patrick Ohl of the blog At the Scene of the Crime has posted two lists of merit: his top 10 author discoveries of 2012 and his assessment of the new mysteries and thrillers he read this year. Publishers Weekly offers its dozen favorite new entries in the genre here. Curtis Evans--whose new non-fiction work about “humdrum” mystery writers I reviewed favorably a couple of months ago--includes 20 novels, new and vintage, on his Best Books Blogged list; click here for Part I, here for Part II, and here for Part III (with a “final five” post expected soon). Jen Forbus catalogues her favorite first lines and book covers here, and her favorite audiobooks of the year here. Finally, Ransom Notes columnist Jedidiah Ayres presents his tally of “favorite debut novels of 2012” here.

If you have spotted any more best-of-the-year crime-fiction wrap-ups on the Web, please let the rest of us know about them in the Comments section of this post.

Bullet Points: The Day After Edition

• Even as I finish work on the crime-fiction section of January Magazine’s “Best Books of 2012” feature package, other publications are posting their own favorite reads from the last twelvemonth. The Miami Herald touts its preferences here, while you can look for Book Chase’s choices here, blogger Nick Jones’ here, author Heath Lowrance’s here, and CrimeFictionLover’s here. Oh, and a variety of well-known UK wordsmiths list their favorites in Pulp Pusher.

• Meanwhile, British critic Robin Jarossi has posted his rundown of “2012’s ten best crime shows” right here.

• Wow, publisher Thomas & Mercer has certainly done well by Max Allan Collins, releasing many of his older novels in handsome new paperback editions. It’s especially nice to see Collins’ six “disaster mysteries” back in print.

• It seems that the largest government-sanctioned execution in U.S. history took place 150 years ago today, on December 26, 1862. Thirty-eight Dakota Indians were hanged in the small town of Mankato, Minnesota, for “killing 490 white settlers, including women and children, in the Santee Sioux uprising the previous August.” Those executions marked the end of the so-called Dakota War of 1862. The story of that largely forgotten conflict is told in Scott W. Berg’s new book, 38 Nooses: Lincoln, Little Crow, and the Beginning of the Frontier’s End, which I just received for Christmas from my friend Byron, and look forward to reading.

• I’ve never really given much thought to Christmas-and-crime crossovers, but following on the heels of my recent recommendation that you watch a holiday-themed episode of Man Against Crime and The Avengers’ “Too Many Christmas Trees” ep, let me point you as well to these seasonal treats: the December 21, 1957, installment of Have Gun, Will Travel, titled “The Hanging Cross”; a clip from the December 23, 1966, episode of The Man from U.N.C.L.E., “The Jingle Bells Affair”; and “The Case of the Christmas Pudding,” the April 4, 1955, episode of Sherlock Holmes, a short-lived American series, based of course on Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous Victorian sleuth.

• Here’s another museum worth visiting in Washington, D.C.

• British producer and writer Gerry Anderson--who gave TV watchers such science-fiction classics as Stingray, Thunderbirds, Space: 1999, and (my personal favorite) UFO--has passed away at age 83.

• Although it’s been wildly uneven in the quality of its coverage over the last several years, I am still sorry to see Newsweek release its final print edition this week. Launched under the banner News-Week on February 17, 1933, the magazine was owned for most of its 79 years by The Washington Post Company, which finally sold it in 2010 after significant monetary losses. Reports are that Newsweek will be reborn in 2013 as the all-digital Newsweek Global, but for all intents and purposes, the mag as we have known and loved it is dead.

• This “chilling graph in Ezra Klein’s Washington Post blog makes abundantly clear that “in the United States, when people decide to kill people, or kill themselves, they typically reach for a gun.”

• Perfect for today: a Boxing Day mystery.

• Drat, another fine Shell Scott story I haven’t read.

• Slattery’s People is one of those TV dramas I’ve heard quite a bit about over the years, but have never seen. Broadcast on CBS from 1964 to 1965, and starring Richard Crenna, it was, as Wikipedia notes, “one of the few American television series spotlighting the travails of local politicians, a topic that other programs of the period mainly avoided.” If you’re curious to know more, check out this new article about Slattery’s People in Television Obscurities.

• Gawk with me now at the New York City that once was.

• And here’s bad news for Downton Abbey fans, like me: Dan Stevens, who plays reluctant heir Matthew Crawley on that extraordinarily popular British period series, won’t be returning for Season Four. Meanwhile, American viewers should ready themselves for the start of Season Three on PBS-TV on Sunday, January 6.

Bullet Points: Review and Revivals Edition

• There are so many Christmas-related mysteries, editor-blogger Janet Rudolph is posting them alphabetically in several parts. Novels by authors whose last names begin with the letters A-D can be found here; the E-H listings are here; and crime fiction by wordsmiths bearing monikers that start with I-N are here. The rest of the alphabet should be covered in Rudolph’s Mystery Fanfare this week.

• I have never watched 1935’s The Glass Key, the first of two big-screen adaptations of Dashiell Hammett’s novel of the same name. But Kliph Nesteroff’s Classic Television Showbiz blog now features that picture in its entirety here. (By the way, the second version of Hammett’s novel was made in 1942 and starred both Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake. Click here to view a clip from that adaptation.)

• TV watchers who enjoyed the too-soon-cancelled, 2010-2011 series Detroit 1-8-7 might be interested to learn that the AMC network has given the go-ahead to production of another cop series set in the Motor City. According to the news site Deadline Detroit, AMC has “ordered up 10, one-hour episodes” of Low Winter Sun, adding that “the Detroit cop show is based on a 2006 British miniseries and focuses on murder, revenge and corruption. It will debut sometime in 2013.” The Hollywood Reporter explains that Low Winter Sun “is a contemporary story of murder, deception, revenge and corruption in a world where the line between cops and criminals is blurred. The drama kicks off with the murder of a cop by a Detroit detective.” Like the 2006 original, this AMC remake will star UK actor Mark Strong.

• Just try to use this word in a sentence.

• The new table-computer-based crime-fiction periodical, Noir Magazine, was originally set to debut this last October, but that launch had to be delayed; the expectation now is that its first issue will appear this coming Wednesday, December 19. In a note sent to people who helped fund Noir’s creation through Kickstarter, editor Nancie Clare says the inaugural edition will be “an embarrassment of riches,” featuring “articles and stories by Lee Child, Michael Connelly, Denise Hamilton, Annie Jacobson, Laura Lippman and Otto Penzler, among others.” In addition, “writers Val McDermid and Craig Robertson weigh in on the inaugural Scottish crime writer’s festival, Bloody Scotland, and Denise Mina takes us on a tour of her Glasgow.”

• You haven’t yet seen the last of Tony Hillerman’s two Navajo tribal policemen, Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee. Hillerman passed away in 2008, but his daughter, Anne Hillerman, tells New Mexico’s Albuquerque Journal that she intends to continue her father’s award-winning mystery-fiction series. Her first new Leaphorn-Chee novel, Spider Woman’s Daughter, is slated for release this coming fall by publisher HarperCollins. (Hat tip to Omnimystery News.)

• I’m still tracking critics’ tallies of their favorite crime and thriller fiction from 2012. Irish author and blogger Declan Burke includes on his list The Silver Stain, by Paul Johnston; The Gods of Gotham, by Lyndsay Faye; and Another Time, Another Life, by Leif G.W. Persson. Meanwhile, among Pulp Curry’s choices are The Darkest Little Room, by Patrick Holland, and Dare Me, by Megan Abbott. And The New Yorker’s Malcolm Gladwell applauds Shake Off, by Mischa Hiller.

• More “best of 2012”: The blog Guns, Gams, and Gumshoes selects its “7 Favorite Private Investigator Sites” of the year.

• Criminal Element’s Deborah Lacy chooses her favorite crime-fighting TV couples. I’m just pleased to see that they’re not exclusively from the last 10 or 15 years. She includes among the bunch Remington Steele and Laura Holt of Remington Steele, along with David Addison and Maddie Hayes of Moonlighting. I’d like to add to Lacy’s list Amanda King and Lee Stetson from Scarecrow and Mrs. King, and--though it violates the man-and-woman theme--Christine Cagney and Mary Beth Lacey from Cagney & Lacey.

• Well, this is embarrassing.

• An interview worth reading: J. Sydney Jones talks with Qiu Xiaolong, Chinese author of the Inspector Chen series.

• Curt Evans celebrates one of Ross Macdonald’s few non-Lew Archer novels, 1960’s The Ferguson Affair, in The Passing Tramp.

• Mystery*File’s Michael Shonk weighs the strengths of various TV show opening themes seen over the last few decades.

• And this should bring new attention to the prospective TV revival of The Saint: Radiant actress Eliza Dushku (formerly of Tru Calling and Dollhouse) has reportedly signed on to play Patricia Holm, Simon Templar’s on-and-off girlfriend, opposite Adam Rayner in the lead role.

The Great and the Good

It’s December, so there is no surprise in the fact that various print and Web publications are releasing their “best of the year” book lists.

The “social cataloguing” site Goodreads is up with its list of 20 top reader choices in the Mystery & Thriller field, including William Landay’s Defending Jacob, Tana French’s Broken Harbor, Robert Crais’ Taken, Jo Nesbø’s Phantom, and--its No. 1 choice--Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl. (Lyndsay Faye’s The Gods of Gotham earns “best of the year” mention as well, but in the historical fiction section. And J.K. Rowling’s The Casual Vacancy appears under general fiction.)

Gone Girl and The Casual Vacancy also find positions on Book Riot’s “Best Books of 2012” rundown.

* * *

Meanwhile, Britain’s Specsavers National Book Award winners were announced last evening, with Lee Child’s A Wanted Man (Bantam Press) being named the Crime & Thriller of the Year.

Also contending for that boast-worthy accolade were Kind of Cruel, by Sophie Hannah (Hodder & Stoughton); A Question of Identity, by Susan Hill (Chatto & Windus); The House of Silk, by Anthony Horowitz (Orion); Perfect People, by Peter James (Macmillan); and Gods and Beasts, by Denise Mina (Orion).

As Karen Meek at Euro Crime reports, Scottish novelist Ian Rankin won this year’s Outstanding Achievement Award.

These Are a Few of My Favorite Reads

What do you know, it’s not even the 1st of December yet, and I have already selected my 10 favorite crime, mystery, and thriller novels published in 2012. I won’t tell you here which works made the cut, but my Kirkus Reviews column today is devoted to it.

Click here to read more. And please feel free to add your own suggestions of the year’s best crime fiction in the Comments section at the end of that column.

* * *

I should note, too, that while 10 is a neat and conventional number for this sort of accounting, it’s also a highly restrictive one. Over the last 12 months, I have enjoyed many times more works in this genre than 10, published for the first time on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. Some of those I didn’t include in my Kirkus count also deserve particular attention for the quality of their prose or storytelling. So below I offer up 25 “honorable mentions” for 2012, listed alphabetically rather than in order of preference:

• Archie Meets Nero Wolfe, by Robert Goldsborough
(The Mysterious Press/Open Road)
• Bellringer, by J. Robert Janes (The Mysterious Press/Open Road)
• Blood Lance, by Jeri Westerson (Minotaur)
• The Boy in the Snow, by M.J. McGrath (Viking)
• City of Saints, by Andrew Hunt (Minotaur)
• Dare Me, by Megan Abbott (Reagan Arthur)
• Dead and Buried, by Stephen Booth (Sphere UK)
• Death on the Pont Noir, by Adrian Magson (Allison & Busby)
• Detroit Breakdown, by D.E. Johnson (Minotaur)
• The Devil’s Cave, by Martin Walker (Quercus UK)
• Die a Stranger, by Steve Hamilton (Minotaur)
• The Double Game, by Dan Fesperman (Knopf)
• House of the Hunted, by Mark Mills (Random House)
• Kings of Midnight, by Wallace Stroby (Minotaur)
• Lake Country, by Sean Doolittle (Bantam)
• Lehrter Station, by David Downing (Soho Crime)
• Live by Night, by Dennis Lehane (Morrow)
• Mission to Paris, by Alan Furst (Random House)
• Murder Mile, by Tony Black (Preface Publishing UK)
• The Professionals, by Owen Laukkanen (Putnam)
• Robert B. Parker’s Lullaby, by Ace Atkins (Putnam)
• Standing in Another Man’s Grave, by Ian Rankin (Orion UK)
• Target Lancer, by Max Allan Collins (Forge)
• The Twenty-Year Death, by Ariel S. Winter (Hard Case Crime)
• Trust Your Eyes, by Linwood Barclay (NAL)

I don’t think you will go wrong giving any of these novels as holiday presents, or just purchasing them for your own reading pleasure.

Fishing All the Ponds

• It’s only mid-November, but already we’re starting to see lists of the Best Crime/Mystery/Thriller Novels of 2012. The editors at bookseller Amazon this week posted their top 10 picks:

1. Gone Girl, by Gillian Flynn
2. Sweet Tooth, by Ian McEwan
3. Live by Night, by Dennis Lehane
4. Phantom, by Jo Nesbø
5. Defending Jacob, by William Landay
6. Broken Harbor, by Tana French
7. Creole Belle, by James Lee Burke
8. May We Be Forgiven, by A.M. Homes
9. Afterwards, by Rosamund Lupton
10. The Thief, by Fuminori Nakamura

(Hat tip to Crime Watch.)

I can’t say that I agree with all of those choices, but that’s my prerogative as a critic and enthusiastic reader in the genre. I evidently have different tastes than the folks at Amazon. I’m currently preparing my own catalogues of “favorites,” one set to appear in my Kirkus Reviews column of November 27, with additional titles to be featured in January Magazine not long after that.

• With just a week left before Thanksgiving, you might want to give some thought to finding a holiday-appropriate crime-fiction read. Here’s Janet Rudolph’s list of Thanksgiving mysteries from 2011. And click here to see some additional selections from B.V. Lawson of the blog In Reference to Murder.

• I heard some time ago that Netflix was planning to launch a new adaptation of Michael Dobbs’ 1989 political thriller, House of Cards. But I’d forgotten just how soon it was set to appear on TV screens. As Omnimystery News reports, this Americanized version--starring Kevin Spacey as Congressman Francis Underwood and Robin Wright as his wife, Claire--will be available

“only for Netflix streaming subscribers on February 1st, 2013.” (The trailer is embedded on the left.) With Spacey acting as one of the project’s developers and executive producers (together with David Fincher, who brought us both the U.S. version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and 2007’s Zodiac), the results are likely to be worth watching. But I have to say, I don’t want this second adaptation--set on Capitol Hill, rather than in the Houses of Parliament--to supplant my memories of the original, 1990 BBC-TV version, with starred Ian Richardson as Francis Urquhart, the British Conservative Party’s ambitious, calculating, and thoroughly amoral chief whip. Richardson, a Tony Award-winning founding member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, brought the ideal balance of arrogance and odiousness to the part of Francis Urquhart (brilliantly nicknamed “F.U.”). In fact, so popular was his House of Cards on both sides of the Atlantic, that it spawned two sequels. If you have not already watched Richardson’s mini-series, you ought to do so before tuning in Spacey’s remake. You’ll find the original show’s distinctive opening here.

• The blog Tipping My Fedora has reviewed one of my favorites among Ross Macdonald’s 18 private-eye Lew Archer novels, The Zebra-Striped Hearse, first published in 1962.

• Following his previous collection of paperback spy-novel fronts (check them out here), Andrew Nette of Pulp Curry today features a second set of covers, these from stories set in Asia.

• The four-part Sky Atlantic TV drama Falcón, based on the first two of Robert Wilson’s exceptional novels about Seville-based Inspector Jefe Javier Falcón and starring Marton Csokas, began showing tonight in Britain. I hope that it will eventually become available to American television watchers like me. But in the meantime, I’m left to appreciate this minute-long trailer for the series.

• I’ve long been a fan of this movie opening.

• Congratulations to Terence Towles Canote on his 2,000th post in A Shroud of Thoughts. He has been working on that movie- and TV-oriented blog ever since 2004.

• Jeremy Lynch of Crimespree Magazine writes that the U.S. TV network The CW “is looking to develop Thomas Perry’s Jane Whitefield for a series. Jane, who has appeared in seven novels, is a Native American guide who helps people in danger disappear.” Perry’s most recent Whitefield adventure is Poison Flower, which saw print earlier this year, but he has a new, non-series suspenser, The Boyfriend, due out from The Mysterious Press in March 2013.

• Law & Order fans, take note: Overthinkingit.com has put together a database of 20 years worth of L&O episodes, including the legal outcomes of each show. What a daunting project that must have been ... Also worth checking out, by the way, is Chris Zimmer’s blog, All Things Law and Order.

• NoirCon 2012 took place last week in Philadelphia, but Cullen Gallagher is still posting about it in Pulp Serenade. You’ll find a video excerpt from Robert Olen Butler’s keynote address here. And you can watch Lawrence Block accept the David Loeb Goodis Award here.

• Meanwhile, blogger Jen Forbus offers a nice wrap-up of Muskego, Wisconsin’s Murder and Mayhem convention, which took place on Saturday, November 10. She’s also posted an almost-complete video of the interview she did there with Robert Crais.

• Jim Napier reviews Lehrter Station, the latest installment in David Downing’s World War II espionage series, for January Magazine.

• Well, that’s frustrating. In a list of the “Top 10 Most-Read Books in the World,” there’s only one crime or thriller work ... and it’s Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code.

• In an interview that appeared originally in The Browser, Keith Jeffery, author of The Secret History of MI6: 1909-1949, talks about the origins of Ian Fleming’s renowned Agent 007 and five books that influenced his own writing.

• And here’s something that every James Bond lover will love.