Bullet Points: Talk Like a Pirate Day Edition

Yes, it’s that time again--time to raise the Jolly Roger flag and tempt a passing wench with one of those great old pirate pickup lines, something in the pattern of “How’d you like to scrape the barnacles off of me rudder?” International Talk Like a Pirate Day only comes around once each year, so make the most of it. My own contribution is to plunder the Web for crime fiction-related treasure.

• Writes blogger Janet Rudolph: “Today is the first day of Rosh Hashana, the beginning of the Jewish New Year. Today also starts the first of eight days of awe that culminates on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement and the holiest day in the Jewish calendar.” Appropriately, she’s gathered together a short list of Yom Kippur-related mystery novels.

• Today also happens to be the 81st birthday of Adam West, the Seattle, Washington-born actor who starred (with Burt Ward and Yvonne Craig) in that campy but nonethess classic ABC-TV series, Batman. The show debuted in January 1966, lasted for two years, and even spawned a theatrical film (which I remember seeing in a drive-in theater when I was but a tyke). West has done a considerable number of guest shots since Batman, as well as a lot of voice-over work; but after playing “millionaire playboy Bruce Wayne,” aka the Caped Crusader, he had trouble landing more substantive TV roles. He’s fated to be remembered, it seems, for his first starring role. (Hat tip to Bill Crider.)

• Iowa newspaper editor John Kenyon, better known in these parts as the author of the blog Things I’d Rather Be Doing, is responsible for the latest short-story offering at Beat to a Pulp. His tale is called “A Wild and Crazy Night.”

• Following up on The Rap Sheet’s mention of how Butterfinger candy-bar producers adapted the theme from Goldfinger for their own commercial purposes, The HMSS Weblog cites another similar exploitation: actor Harold Sakata reprising his role as the villainous Oddjob in an add for Vicks 44.

• More changes for Law & Order: Criminal Intent. From TV Squad: “Julianne Nicholson has decided not to come back to the show after leaving for a while to have a baby. She was teamed with the newest cast member, Jeff Goldblum, but there’s no word yet on whether or not he’ll be coming back to the show. Who will take Nicholson’s place? It’s not definite yet, but Michael Ausiello is saying that Saffron Burrows is the most likely suspect. There’s also no word on what will happen to Vincent D’Onofrio and Kathryn Erbe.” Yikes! I hope that there are no other changes than Nicholson’s leaving. I’ve grown to like L&O: CI very much over the years, and was very happy to see Goldblum added to the already impressive cast.

• I noted earlier this week that Paul Burke, who starred in the 1958-1963 police procedural series Naked City, had passed away at age 83. Stephen Bowie of The Classic TV History Blog has a few more things to say on that subject.

• And Sarah Weinman reports that Maxim Jakubowski, who closed his Murder One bookstore in London earlier this year, will be in charge of a new crime-fiction imprint, maXcrime, beginning in 2010.

Striking Gold(blum)

I’ve been enjoying Jeff Goldblum’s recent introduction to the cast of Law & Order: Criminal Intent. Taking over from actor Chris Noth (who always looked as if he was one tattered fuse away from exploding, due to all of his internal frustrations), Goldblum alternates in the series lead with Vincent D’Onofrio, and partners with Julianne Nicholson. I was sorry when NBC cancelled Raines, the show in which Goldblum played a Los Angeles cop haunted by the victims of crimes he was investigating; and I appreciated the actor’s turn in the 1980 detective-comedy series Tenspeed and Brown Shoe (remember this opening?), even if I wasn’t a resolute fan of the program. So I was pleased to hear that Goldblum would be joining L&O: CI.

But Slate’s Nathan Heller (who shouldn’t be confused with the fictional gumshoe of that same name) insists this was a poor casting call. He writes:

We all know Goldblum is a quirky guy. But it’s rare that quirkiness is so starkly at odds with its surroundings. Law & Order has existed in one flavor or another for just short of 20 years; the recipe is as golden as a Wonka chocolate bar and basically unchanged since the ascendancy of Hammer pants. Our overcoated heroes beat the New York pavement in pursuit of heinous criminals, trawling from lavish townhouses to grim walk-ups and keeping countless coffee carts solvent along the way. Criminal Intent is the series’ most eccentric flavor, blending a high tolerance for idiosyncrasy (Vincent D’Onofrio’s Detective Robert Goren gets more fitful, obsessive, and shabby-looking with each season) with a low attention span for jurisprudence. But Goldblum exceeds even these allowances. The latest season doesn’t come across as Law & Order with Jeff Goldblum cast as a police dick. It comes across as an oblique, high-irony parody of Law & Order with Jeff Goldblum playing both the premise and the punch line.

Heller might not have been disappointed to hear the news that Goldblum had died on a New Zealand movie set, even though that turned out to be misinformation. But what about the rest of you? Do you think Jeff Golblum is a welcome or weird addition to L&O: CI?

Not to Go Unmentioned ...

• There’s talk that the last two original stars of Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Vincent D’Onofrio and Kathryn Erbe, may not be part of that series when it returns for its ninth season in March 2010. Eric Bogosian, who’s played Captain Daniel Ross, is also said to be on his way out. That would leave Jeff Goldblum, who just joined this procedural series last year, as the only remaining member of its cast. (It was previously reported that Julianne Nicholson would be replaced as Goldblum’s partner by Boston Legal’s Saffron Burrows.) This sounds like mostly bad news about one of the few series I can still bear to watch on television. Goldblum has made a good showing since his introduction; but D’Onofrio and Erbe remain L&O: CI’s real stars. According to The Hollywood Reporter, these radical changes may be the result of politics at the USA Network, which picked up this program from sister channel NBC: “USA, insiders point out, likes lighter fare when it comes to its shows. Goldblum is more in the tradition of Tony Shalhoub’s ‘Monk’ than D’Onofrio.” I have my fingers crossed that all of this is just a Dallas-like dream, and that I’ll wake soon to discover that no such changes are in the offing.

• Pulp International has posted a very cool set of vintage paperback covers from John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee novels.

• “Tonight (Saturday, September 26), James Ellroy appears at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland, as the closing event of the 2009 Fall for the Book festival,” reports critic (and sometime Rap Sheet contributor) Art Taylor. “I’ll be introducing Ellroy at tonight’s event, and my recent interview with Ellroy has been posted on the Washington Post Book World’s Web site here.”

• The new short story at Beat the Pulp comes from California wordsmith Brian Drake. His tale is called “The Red Ruby Kill.”

• Can this be? Actresses Brigitte Bardot (best viewed here) and Sophia Loren both turn 75 years old in late September.

• And two birthdays worth celebrating today: classic American bodybuilder Jack Lalanne turns 95; and it was exactly 40 years ago that The Brady Bunch debuted on ABC-TV. As Ivan G. Shreve Jr. notes at that link, The Brady Bunch “was inspired by a 1965 Los Angeles Times article creator Sherwood Schwartz read noting that nearly 40 percent of marriages in the United States had at least one child (and sometimes more) from a previous union.”