Bullet Points: Long Overdue Edition

During the four days I spent in San Francisco this last February, attending the latest Left Coast Crime convention, more than one fellow attendee came up to me to say how much they like my periodic, multiple-subject “Bullet Points” posts. While that gladdened my heart, it also reminded me of how long it had been since I’d produced such a compilation. I think the last one went up in October, which in these tense, turbulent times seems like a lifetime ago.

With a few free hours on my hands today, I went trolling through my computer bookmarks to find new subjects worth sharing.

• Well, what do you know: In Reference to Murder reports that the American author who, since 2013, has published best-selling psychological thrillers (such as The Housemaid, The Tenant, and The Divorce) under the name Freida McFadden has finally revealed her true identity. She is “in reality Sara Cohen, a doctor who treats brain disorders and only created the pseudonym because she didn’t want her writing career to conflict with her hospital job. ‘My whole goal was to keep it a secret until I was [ready to] step back from my doctor job, so it wouldn’t be like everyone I work with suddenly knew and it compromised my ability to do my job,’ McFadden says. In late 2023, she stopped working full-time.” But even her nom de plume is rooted in the medical profession; Cohen told the BBC that “She chose the name Freida as a medical in-joke—after a hospital training registry, the Fellowship and Residency Electronic Interactive Database.”

• April 1 marked the 28th anniversary of Kevin Burton Smith launching that essential online crime-fiction resource, The Thrilling Detective Web Site. His page went live on that date back in 1998! Congratulations to my old friend Kevin for sticking with this project for so long and growing it so expertly.

• Speaking of milestones, it was half a century ago this year—on September 22, 1976, to be precise—that the hour-long “jiggle TV” crime drama Charlie’s Angels debuted on America’s ABC network. In early commemoration of that fact, three of the show’s stars, Kate Jackson, Jaclyn Smith, and Cheryl Ladd, “reunited” earlier this week at PaleyFest in Los Angeles (“an annual television festival hosted by the Paley Center”). According to the Associated Press, “They were greeted with a standing ovation and whoops and cheers from an audience at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood.” Smith, now 80 years old (!), may have delivered the occasion’s best line: “I knew the show was different, special and unique. Three women chasing danger instead of getting rescued.” Charlie’s Angels aired for five seasons and was a pop-culture hit (despite talk of it undermining feminism), but underwent several cast changes over time, the first of those coming in 1977, when Fawcett left amid a contract dispute. She was replaced by Ladd.

• London’s two-day Capital Crime festival has issued its full program of 2026 events, which are set to kick off at the Leonardo Royal Hotel on Thursday, June 18. Among the headliners will be authors Elly Griffiths, Jeffrey Archer, Jane Harper, and Sophie Hannah, with Irish comedian and actor Ardal O’Hanlon (formerly of Death in Paradise) also participating. An overview of events can be found here. Winners of the annual Fingerprint Awards, celebrating the foremost crime and thriller fiction in more than half a dozen categories, will be honored in a special ceremony on the 18th.

• Erle Stanley Gardner’s The D.A. Calls It Murder (1937)—the first of his legal mysteries starring small-town California district attorney Douglas Selby—was reissued last summer through Otto Penzler’s American Mystery Classics imprint. What I hadn’t realized until recently, however, was that publisher Open Road Integrated Media has also returned to print seven of the eight other entries in the Selby line. Which is good news! As I wrote in CrimeReads, “While those stories never enjoyed the same level of reader enthusiasm Perry Mason’s escapades did, and were neither as humorous nor as briskly paced as another series Gardner launched in 1939, built around mismatched L.A. gumshoes Bertha Cool and Donald Lam, they certainly offered plenty in the way of knotty plots, ill-starred suspects, and razzle-dazzle legal shenanigans.” Click here for more about those paperbacks.

• By the way, the remaining Selby novel, 1948’s The D.A. Takes a Chance, was last reprinted in 2014 by The Murder Room, an imprint of UK publisher Orion. Although The Murder Room is evidently now defunct, Open Road hasn’t yet added it to its catalogue. Maybe soon?

• There seems be no end of television-related news lately, beginning with word that the ITV and BritBox “reimaginging” of Dalziel and Pascoe has begun filming in the North of England. This sex-switching update of characters born in novels by Reginald Hill—and made additionally famous in a 1996-2007 BBC One series—finds grumpy, intransigent, and very politically incorrect Detective Superintendent Andy Dalziel (played in the original show by Warren Clarke) being transformed into Detective Inspector Andrea Dalziel and portrayed by Kerry Godliman, while Dalziel’s more forward-thinking police partner, DI Peter Pascoe (Colin Buchanan) becomes Detective Sergeant Paige Pascoe, brought to the small screen by Nina Singh. The opening season of this new crime drama will comprise six episodes; there’s no official debut date at present. Jon Farrar, executive vice president of programming, BritBox, is quoted in Variety as assuring fans of the earlier production that this one will hew to familiar themes: “Dalziel and Pascoe has always been about friction, intellect, and the uneasy bond of opposites, forged in pursuit of truth. Dalziel and Pascoe’s chemistry, wit, and moral clarity perfectly complement this richly layered mystery. It’s timeless crime storytelling that not only honours but sharpens its legacy.” I look forward to judging for myself.

• For all of those people who, like me, watched and enjoyed the slow-burning “cat-and-mouse thriller” The Game, and thought its ambiguous but not unsatisfying ending offered zero chance of a sequel … well, what the hell do we know? Even the Web site TVGuide.co.uk concedes this is “rather surprising” news; Channel 5 thrillers are usually one-season wonders, “self-contained nuggets of deliciously daft drama” (e.g., The Au Pair and The Rumour). But The Game, which had its UK airing in 2025 and found Jason Watkins (McDonald & Dodds) playing Huw Miller, a recently retired police detective who becomes convinced that his suave new neighbor, Patrick Harbottle (Grantchester’s Robson Green), is the repeat killer he’s long pursued, “left viewers wanting more,” says TVGuide.co.uk. At the close of Series 1, Patrick was being arrested and Huw was seriously injured. The follow-up is set a year on. It sees Huw having survived and thinking himself free of the psychological grip Patrick held him in. “Retreating with his wife, Alice (Sunetra Sarker), to an isolated house by the sea,” The Killing Times explains, “Huw is determined to rebuild a quiet life, far from the violence that nearly destroyed them. But peace, he soon realises, is an illusion.” Channel 5 says The Game will return in 2027.

• Robson Green is much in demand. The Killing Times reports that, with his work done on Grantchester’s 11th and final season (set to premiere on PBS Masterpiece come June 14), he will assume one of the leading roles in an eight-part BBC serial, The Northumbria Mysteries.

Set against the sweeping Northumberland coastline and its surrounding market towns, the series centres on an unlikely crime-solving duo.

Green will star as Joe Ruby, a jack-of-all-trades whose life has been shaped by mistakes, regrets and missed opportunities, alongside Oxford-educated DI Rose O’Connell (casting to be announced), a rarefied intellectual, a deep thinker with a brilliant mind and an ice-cool disposition. In a classic odd-couple pairing, Joe and Rose combine their talents as they frustrate, confound, and ultimately surprise one another while unravelling a series of compelling crime mysteries.

• Something I should have mentioned long ago: HBO-TV has ordered an eight-episode drama based on Adrian McKinty’s best-selling 2019 child-abduction novel, The Chain. Behind this project is Damon Lindelof, who previously gave us Lost and The Leftovers, and was once a writer on Nash Bridges and Crossing Jordan. As The Wrap recalls, Irish author McKinty’s chilling tale “follows Rachel, a divorcée who is undergoing treatment for cancer, who gets a call that her daughter, Kylie, has been kidnapped and is now part of The Chain. To get Kylie back, she must kidnap another child after paying a ransom. Kylie will be released when the parents of the child Rachel has kidnapped take yet another child and continue the chain.” The Wrap notes, however, that “Lindelof is said to be expanding the mythology of McKinty’s award-winning thriller.”

• Blogger Lou Armagno points me toward a piece in Variety that’s likely to delight fans of Earl Derr Biggers’ renowned Charlie Chan. It says actor Tzi Ma (Mulan, Kung Fu) will executive produce and headline a possible new Canadian Chan TV series reimagining Biggers’ Chinese-American Honolulu policeman as a Hong Kong immigrant to Vancouver, British Columbia, “who, after retiring from the Vancouver police department in frustration, quietly launches a private investigation agency, taking on cases for the city’s overlooked and forgotten.”

• Meanwhile, Stranger Things’ Maya Hawke has signed up to play a criminal investigator in Netflix’s adaptation of Liz Moore’s 2024 hit novel, The God of the Woods. … Actor-writer Stephen Fry will star as a quirky but brilliant former MI6 agent in a forthcoming Fox-TV show called The Interrogator. … See-Saw films, the production company behind Slow Horses, has acquired the rights to develop a fresh TV series from Jonathan Gash’s novels about a British antiques dealer-cum-sleuth known only as Lovejoy—books that were already the source material for a 1986-1984 BBC1 comedy-drama featuring Ian McShane. … Filming is underway on the sophomore season of Lynley, based on Elizabeth George’s Inspector Lynley yarns. … And Murder, She Wrote, a Universal Pictures film inspired by the 1984-1996 CBS-TV series starring Angela Lansbury as a mystery writer and amateur crime-solver, is slated to reach theaters just in time for Christmas, 2027. Jamie Lee Curtis will play Fletcher in this version.

• My other blog, Killer Covers, returns from a too-long hiatus with proof that there are simply too many crime, mystery, and thriller novels fronted by silhouettes of people in windows.

• We still await any information regarding the next James Bond feature film (now under the control of Amazon). But in the meantime, we can look forward to a new Bond novel for adults. Titled King Zero, it’s by Charlie Higson, the author of a half a dozen Young Bond yarns, as well as the 2023 007 adventure, On His Majesty’s Secret Service. Shotsmag Confidential provides this plot précis:

Beginning with the murder of an agent in Saudi Arabia by a weapon never before seen by the Secret Service and spanning the globe in an epic race against time to avert global catastrophe, the novel brings the literary Bond squarely into the twenty-first century, where the old world that made him is crumbling and a terrifying new order emerges while a dangerous villain—the most distinctive since Goldfinger –moves in the shadows. Higson explores themes of power, technology, and international tensions over resources in an extraordinarily timely story.

UK publisher Michael Joseph has promised to deliver King Zero to bookshops on the other side of the pond by September 24.

• Wow, a Kickstarter campaign to create action figures based on monster-hunting reporter Carl Kolchak and other characters featured in two 1970s teleflicks (The Night Stalker and The Night Strangler) and a subsequent TV series collected way more money than was sought! I guess old Carl hasn’t been forgotten, after all.

• Finally, this CrimeReads piece by writer and artist Frank Ladd, comparing the oeuvres of American private eye novelists Ross Macdonald and Raymond Chandler, deserves attention from fans of both. He concludes that “In a way, Macdonald is writing moral ghost stories. The present is haunted by the past, and the novel becomes a kind of exorcism. Chandler is writing moral fever dreams, hallucinatory journeys through corruption. There is no past worth redeeming.”

Sink Your Fangs Into This

While writing earlier this week about the sad demise of Jeff Rice--whose then-unpublished horror novel, The Kolchak Papers, spawned the wildly popular 1972 ABC-TV Movie of the Week, The Night Stalker--I started to dig through my file boxes for the 1974 Fall Preview edition of TV Guide. It was in that issue, I knew, that Darren McGavin’s hour-long drama based on the ’72 teleflick (as well as its 1973 sequel, The Night Strangler) was introduced. Unfortunately, I was not able to find the magazine--until this afternoon.

The page below comes from TV Guide’s September 7-13, 1974, edition. What we now remember as the short-lived series Kolchak: The Night Stalker is listed here simply as The Night Stalker--the title it carried through its first several episodes. Whoever penned the mag’s preview of McGavin’s Friday chiller had some fun with its concept. “This show is a scream,” he or she wrote. “And a moan and a gasp and a shriek. Not to mention eyes widening in terror, hands clutching throats, bodies slumping to floors, and figures lurking in shadows.” You can read the rest by clicking on this image:



The 1974 fall TV season had its bright spots: Valerie Harper’s Rhoda and James Garner’s The Rockford Files both premiered in September of that year, as did Little House on the Prairie, Police Woman, and David Janssen’s underrated private-eye drama, Harry O. But that fall also welcomed short-timers such as The New Land (“a Swedish Waltons”), The Texas Wheelers (starring Jack Elam and Mark Hamill), and Clint Walker’s Kodiak, which cast the former Cheyenne star as an Alaska State Patrol officer charged with keeping the peace on 50,000 square miles of backwoods. Kolchak: The Night Stalker probably wouldn’t be remembered if it hadn’t become a cult favorite.

READ MORE: “Claim That Tune,” by J. Kingston Pierce (Limbo).

Say Good-bye to Kolchak’s “Father”

Just the other day I was thinking that it had been a long while since I’d last watched the 1972 made-for-television vampire flick, The Night Stalker, starring Darren McGavin as journalist-turned-monster hunter Carl Kolchak, and that it was probably time for me to revisit that picture, along with its 1973 sequel, The Night Strangler. But now comes news that Jeff Rice, who created the Kolchak character, died on July 1 in Las Vegas, Nevada, at age 71. John L. Smith, a reporter for the Las Vegas Journal-Review reports that Rice had “suffered from severe depression throughout much of his adult life” and adds that, “In an eerie tribute to the mysteries that surrounded his fiction and life in Las Vegas, the cause and manner of death is pending the results of a toxicology test by the Clark County coroner’s office.”

Jeffrey Grant Rice was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1944 but spent part of his childhood in Beverly Hills, California. He was the son of Bob Rice, characterized by Smith as “a mob-associated costume jewelry maker … and early investor” in Vegas’ old Dunes Hotel and Casino. “Through those family’s connections, the son gained access to the neon glitz and subterranean shadow of Las Vegas. He even worked for a time at local newspapers. Some of that experience seeps into the pages of his story just as it surely crept into his consciousness.”

The story of Rice’s connection to McGavin’s original Night Stalker film has been repeated so many times, it’s probably now part legend; it’s certainly a cautionary tale. Here’s one synopsis, cribbed from Mark Dawidziak’s 1997 book, The Night Stalker Companion:

True-life newspaperman (and actor!) Jeff Rice created Carl Kolchak in The Kolchak Papers, a 1970 horror novel which Rice submitted to [screenwriter] Richard Matheson’s agent. Then, in a shocking example of Hollywood sleaze, the agent sold the unpublished novel’s TV movie rights to ABC--without first signing Rice!--trapping Rice in a done deal he’d never agreed to!

Heart-breakingly, Rice had hoped to write the TV script himself, but the agent had already secured the teleplay assignment for Matheson. Dawidziak adds: “It’s important to note that Rice does not in any way blame Matheson for what he views as shady Hollywood dealings.”

“Rice sued the network…,” explains Smith, “and [ABC] gave creative credit on screen to Rice. But that left him well short of Easy Street. By the time all the Hollywood double dealing was resolved, Rice’s novel was published in 1973 after the hugely successful TV movie. A series followed, and Rice also found success with a second novel, The Night Strangler, co-authored with Richard Matheson.”

I don’t remember when it was that I saw The Night Stalker; I was pretty young when that teleflick first aired, so the likelihood is that I caught up with Carl Kolchak--along with his newspaper boss, the irritable Tony Vincenzo (played by Simon Oakland), and his winsome dancer of a girlfriend, Gail Foster (Carol Lynley)--in reruns. However, I was hooked from the beginning, as a blood-sucking vampire started knocking off the otherwise carefree visitors to Vegas’ showy Sunset Strip. When I later discovered there was a second Kolchak adventure, The Night Strangler (which took place in a highly fictionalized Seattle Underground and found McGavin’s seersucker-wearing newsie confronting a Civil War-era doctor who kept himself alive with an elixir featuring blood taken from murdered women), I could hardly wait to watch that, too. And after I read (in this very article, from a 1973 edition of my then-hometown newspaper, the Portland Oregonian) that an ABC-TV series featuring McGavin and Oakland would debut on September 13, 1974, you can bet I cleared my calendar of other commitments. Sadly, I was disappointed at first with Kolchak: The Night Stalker, which moved the action to Chicago, found Kolchak and Vincenzo working for a wire news agency, and came up with some truly cheesy monsters for our tape recorder-carrying hero to combat--everything from an android and a lizard-man to a headless and homicidal motorcycle rider. (Interestingly, that last episode, “Chopper,” was scripted by future Rockford Files writer and Sopranos creator David Chase.) Only in recent years have I come to better appreciate Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1973-1974) for its humor and McGavin’s portrayal of a lonely, rumpled reporter who accepts the world’s horrors--actual, metaphorical, and outright fictional--with more courage and pragmatism than those around him.

Jeff Rice is to be thanked for bringing monsters out from under my bed, putting them on my TV screen, and making me appreciate them as much as I did. I only wish his own life had been a happier one. Although he is said to have found a grateful Internet following in recent years, Smith notes that Rice was also “extremely troubled and increasingly afraid of straying from his home near Desert Inn Road. In leaner times, Rice had rented a room from [his ‘close friend’ Bobbie] Carson and on occasion slept on her couch. She helped him through emotional and mental crises. He cared for her after the 78-year-old fell and broke her hip. The two met 14 years ago. In keeping with the local working-class subculture, they had a loan shark in common and struck up what became an enduring friendship.”

There are apparently no memorial services planned for Carl Kolchak’s creator. Yet you never know--maybe some vampires, werewolves, headless motorcyclists, and other ghouls will shed a tear to know that someone who might have been able to tell their stories, too, has disappeared from this world.

* * *

At least for now, 1972’s The Night Stalker--based on Jeff Rice’s book--is available for viewing on YouTube. Watch it all here.



READ MORE: It Couldn’t Happen Here: An Episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker a Day As Seen Through the Eyes of Peter Enfantino and John Scoleri.

So Long, Seersucker

Since we’d been led to believe, only recently, that It Couldn’t Happen Here ...”--the terrific blog devoted to that 1970s cult-TV series, Kolchak: The Night Stalker--would continue to offer new material for “a few more weeks,” we’re surprised by today’s announcement that it’s already shutting down, though not disappearing.

Over the last week, the blog has added posts about three never-filmed Kolchak episodes (“Eve of Terror, “The Get of Belial,” and “The Executioner”), as well as Mark Dawidziak’s look back at the books and graphic novels that either starred monster-hunting, seersucker-wearing reporter Carl Kolchak, or analyzed the original ABC-TV series. And today, David J. Schow recalls the very short-lived, 2005-2006 series reboot, The Night Stalker, which he notes “was cancelled right in the middle of a two-part episode, with four episodes unbroadcast until the series was re-run on the Sci Fi Channel in 2006.”

We’re sorry to see It Couldn’t Happen Here ... disappear into the night, but a link to it has been installed from The Rap Sheet’s page of archive sites, so it can be relocated easily the next time you want to remember one of American television’s most remarkable, if underappreciated, prime-time programs.

UPDATE: An index to all of the offerings in It Couldn’t Happen Here ..., complete with links, has now been established here.

READ MORE: “Still Stalking Kolchak,” by Amber Keller (Criminal Element).

Oh, Horrors!

It Couldn’t Happen Here ..., the new blog devoted to that horror TV series Kolchak: The Night Stalker, has dug up a 1975 article that crime novelist Stuart M. Kaminsky wrote for Cinefantastique about the Darren McGavin series and its protagonist, “the most unlikely heir to Dr. Van Helsing that one could imagine.”

“For the longest time this was the Kolchak writeup,” remarks blogger John Scoleri. You can read it for yourself here.

A Monster of an Undertaking

Have you checked in yet on the new blog, It Couldn’t Happen Here ..., which promises to deliver everything you ever wanted to know about ABC-TV’s 1974-1975 series, Kolchak: The Night Stalker?

Though it’s only a few days old, the blog has already featured an interview with Mark Dawidziak, author of The Night Stalker Companion; a look back at the 1972 teleflick, The Night Stalker, which launched investigative reporter Carl Kolchak’s monster-hunting career; and author Richard Matheson’s work to adapt Jeff Rice’s then-unpublished novel, The Kolchak Papers, as a small-screen film.

Creature Feature

Break out the porkpie hat and cassette tape recorder again, along with the garlic cloves and silver bullets, because that monster-hunting investigative reporter, Carl Kolchak (Darren McGavin), is back!

Online, at least.

Peter Enfantino and John Scoleri, who recently wrapped up work on their blog To the Batpoles!, an episode-by-episode recap of the 1960s ABC-TV mega-hit Batman, are readying the launch of It Couldn’t Happen Here ..., a new limited-run blog focused on ABC’s 1974-1975 cult favorite, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, and the two earlier teleflicks--The Night Stalker (1972) and The Night Strangler (1973)--that introduced Kolchak.

It Couldn’t Happen Here ... will open for business here on January 1.

McGavin, Mobsters, and Monsters

Incredibly, it was five years ago today that American actor Darren McGavin--whose television roles included leads in Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer (1958-1960), Riverboat (1959-1961), and Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974-1975)--passed away in Los Angeles at age 83.

I wrote about McGavin’s career the day after he died. Rather than rehash all that information, I’ll simply commemorate this anniversary by posting videos from two of the aforementioned TV series. The first clip is the main title sequence from McGavin’s Hammer, followed by a scene in which McGavin faces off against guest star Steve Inhat.





These next two videos show McGavin in what may be his best-remembered role, as investigative reporter Carl Kolchak, a guy with a frightening tendency to stumble upon mythical and murderous monsters. We start off with a collection of promotional spots and other video clips from both the 1972 teleflick The Night Stalker (which won the highest ratings for any small-screen movie of its time) and the TV series that followed it. Then enjoy a scene from episode five of Kolchak, “The Werewolf,” in which McGavin tries to convince the captain of a cruise ship (played by Henry Jones) that there’s a lycanthrope running loose aboard his vessel.





Rest in peace, Darren McGavin.

READ MORE: “How Kolchak: The Night Stalker Developed an Early Model for TV Horror,” by Phil Dyess-Nugent (A.V. Club).

Of Kitty, Kay, and Kolchak

• Julia Buckley interviews UK author John Harvey, whose 100th novel, Far Cry, is due out in the States from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in June. They discuss not only that new book, but also music, Harvey’s interest in America, and how he’s “not really an animal person.”

• So, what was the name of “the only soap opera to have a private eye in the leading role”? It was Kitty Keene, Incorporated, a 15-minute-long serial that featuring a Ziegfeld Follies showgirl turned detective. The program ran for four years, beginning in September 1937, and at least three actresses voiced the title role. Kitty Keene’s creator was Day Keene (né Gunnar Hjerstedt), who shared script-writing responsibilities with Wally Norman. There are apparently only four episodes of the show still available, one of which can be sampled here.

• Paul Tremblay submits his new novel, No Sleep Till Wonderland (the sequel to last year’s The Little Sleep) to Marshal Zeringue’s Page 69 Test. The results are here.

• Sarah Weinman directs us to The Washington Post, in which the full text of David Parker’s February 7 eulogy to his father, Robert B. Parker, has been printed.

• Really? Angelina Jolie is going to play Kay Scarpetta, Patricia Cornwell’s medical examiner protagonist in a possible movie franchise? Oh, yawn ...

• Lights out for the inventor of the Easy-Bake Oven.

• In Episode 50 of the CrimeWAV podcast, author (and all-too-infrequent Rap Sheet contributor) Mark Coggins reads an excerpt from his latest novel, The Big Wake-Up.

• Republican’t whining about how majority Democrats are planning to complete their passage of landmark health-care reform legislation through the budget reconciliation process (a step taken by the GOP itself many times, including to approve a welfare reform bill in 1996) seems finally to be emboldening center-right Dems who’ve become disgusted with the right’s lies and do-nothing attitudes. About damn time ...

• Being a fan of the 1971-1973 ABC-TV western series, Alias Smith and Jones, I’m pleased to hear that Timeless Media will finally release that show’s second and third seasons to DVD on June 8.

• It was four years ago yesterday that film and TV actor Darren McGavin passed away at age 83. Pulp International uses the occasion to revisit his starring role in the mystery-and-monsters series Kolchak: The Night Stalker. My own McGavin obit from 2006--which also mentions the performer’s title role in the 1958-1960 series Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer--can be found here.

• Spare me a moment of nostalgia for the 1965-1967 animated TV series, The Beatles, showcased this week by the blog Classic Television Showbiz. Watch here.

• Oh, great. Another hateful beauty queen.

• Authors Michael G. Jacob and Daniela De Gregorio, who together write historical mysteries as “Michael Gregorio,” have posted an original short story on their Web site. It’s called “William Hodge’s War” and can be found here.

• R.I.P., Ed Thomas of Orange County’s renowned Book Carnival. UPDATE: There’s more on Thomas here.

• And Mark Sarvas denounces Elmore Leonard’s 10 rules of writing fiction (see his comments here), while the ever-clever Declan Burke comes up with “William Shakespeare’s 10 Rules O’Writing” here.