Cops Out

Following his previous weekend-long celebrations of The Saint and Sherlock Holmes, The Tainted Archive’s Gary Dobbs is now deep in the midst of a tribute to TV cop shows from both sides of the Atlantic. Already posted are pieces applauding Columbo, Fabian of the Yard, The Andy Griffith Show, Starsky & Hutch, 77 Sunset Strip, The Professionals, and Sheriff of Cochise. Also included in Dobbs’ package is an interview with a real-life law enforcer, Paul Bishop, who--in addition being an author and blogger--is also in charge of the LAPD’s Mission Division Special Assaults Unit. Bishop lists his favorite small-screen cop series and talks about which he thinks have been the most realistic.

Click here to keep up with the series, which will continue through Sunday.

As an addendum to Dobbs’ project, writer Evan Lewis has posted a full episode of 77 Sunset Strip (starring Efrem Zimbalist Jr.) in his own blog. Titled “ The Widescreen Caper,” that ep was originally broadcast on October 14, 1960, during the show’s third season.

The Big Four: Round Two

You still have a day and half to enter The Rap Sheet’s latest and biggest-yet giveaway contest. The prizes up for grabs are four free copies of the new Mike Hammer detective novel, The Big Bang, written by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins, plus four free copies of the latest original Hammer radio novel on CD, “The Little Death.”

To participate in this competition, all you need do is submit a list of your four favorite private-eye novels. The deadline for entering is midnight tomorrow, Friday, May 21. Complete contest details can be found here.

We already posted the first sampling of entries to this challenge. Today, we bring you another 17 lists of what this blog’s readers believe are the best P.I. novels ever written. There are occasional efforts in these “Big Four” rundowns to stretch (or even subvert) the definition of a private-eye story, but we are not going to be too strict about that. We’re just curious to know what books everybody has been enjoying. And perhaps these lists will inspire some people who’ve read less widely, to take chances on authors or works they have eschewed in the past.

Gary Thaden of Minneapolis, Minnesota:

• The Hound of the Baskervilles, by Arthur Conan Doyle
• The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett
• Devil in a Blue Dress, by Walter Mosley
• Fer-de-Lance, by Rex Stout

Ed Henley of Baltimore, Maryland:

• The Chill, by Ross Macdonald
• Red Harvest, by Dashiell Hammett
• Little Scarlet, by Walter Mosley
• Chasing Darkness, by Robert Crais

Barry Pateman of Albany, California:

• The Ivory Grin, by Ross Macdonald
• Hollywood and Levine, by Andrew Bergman
• October Heat, by Gordon DeMarco
• Devil in a Blue Dress, by Walter Mosley

Thomas Coady of Brooklyn, New York:

• Eight Million Ways to Die, by Lawrence Block
• The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler
• Sunset Express, by Robert Crais
• The Lonely Silver Rain, by John D. MacDonald

David Gauthreaux of Westwego, Louisiana:

• A Coffin for Dimitrios, by Eric Ambler
• The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler
• A Corpse in the Koryo, by James Church
• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson

Pat Lee of Tustin, California:

• The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler
• I, the Jury, by Mickey Spillane
• The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett
• Looking for Rachel Wallace, by Robert B. Parker

Graham Powell of Fort Worth, Texas:

• The Long Goodbye, by Raymond Chandler
• The Wrong Case, by James Crumley
• Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go, by George Pelecanos
• Gone, Baby, Gone, by Dennis Lehane

“Not a whole lot of happy endings there,” adds Powell. “Wonder what
that says about me?”

Gary Dobbs, Porth, South Wales, United Kingdom:

• The Godwulf Manuscript, by Robert B. Parker
• The Guards, by Ken Bruen
• Farewell, My Lovely, by Raymond Chandler
• Gone Fishing, by Walter Mosley

Terrill Lankford of Woodland Hills, California:

• The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett
• The Long Goodbye, by Raymond Chandler
• The Last Good Kiss, by James Crumley
• Blackheart Highway, by Richard Barre

Rick Helms of Weddington, North Carolina:

• The Long Goodbye, by Raymond Chandler
• Early Autumn, by Robert B. Parker
• Empty Ever After, by Reed Farrell Coleman
• Winter and Night, by S.J. Rozan

Keith Raffel of Palo Alto, California:

• The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett
• The Drowning Pool, by Ross Macdonald
• Devil in a Blue Dress, by Walter Mosley
• Red Cat, by Peter Spiegelman

Peter Guzzo of Powell, Ohio:

• Free Fall, by Robert Crais
• Big City, Bad Blood, by Sean Chercover
• The Sins of the Father, by Lawrence Block
• Promised Land, by Robert B. Parker

Harvey Dinerstein of Winthrop, Maine:

• Scattershot, by Bill Pronzini (“actually any early ’80s Nameless books, but I picked this from 1982”)
• Sugartown, by Loren D. Estleman
• When the Sacred Ginmill Closes, by Lawrence Block
• Hell to Pay, by George Pelecanos

William H. Hamilton of Honolulu, Hawaii:

• The Godwulf Manuscript, by Robert B. Parker (“his first and
most memorable”)
• Stalking the Angel, by Robert Crais
• Contract Null and Void, by Joe Gores
• Strawberry Sunday, by Stephen Greenleaf
• The Mexican Tree Duck, by James Crumley

Paul Bishop of Camarillo, California:

• Early Autumn, by Robert B. Parker
• Whip Hand, by Dick Francis
• Embrace the Wolf, by Benjamin M. Schutz
• Just Another Day in Paradise, by A.E. Maxwell

John Stickney of Fairview Park, Ohio:

• The Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett
• Farewell, My Lovely, by Raymond Chandler
• Come Die with Me, by William Campbell Gault
• The Goodbye Look, by Ross Macdonald

David Komaniecki of Chicago, Illinois:

• The Dark Fantastic, by Stanley Ellin
• Angels Flight, by Michael Connolly
• City of Bones, by Michael Connolly
• Road to Perdition, by Max Allan Collins

So, do you think you’re up to the challenge of submitting your own “Big Four” list of favorite private-eye novels? Then enter The Rap Sheet’s new competition now--before it’s too late. What can you lose? And we’ve already told you what you could win!

I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere

There’s a Sherlock Holmes fest going on this weekend at The Tainted Archive, where author-actor Gary Dobbs presents interviews, features, stories, and reviews.

Some of the highlights thus far: a rundown of unlikely Holmes portrayers; Evan Lewis’ critique of Sherlock Holmes, Jr., starring Buster Keaton; a review of the 1944 Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce film, The Scarlet Claw; Hard Case Crime editor Charles Ardai on The Valley of Fear as hard-boiled detective fiction; the full text of “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” (1892); a review of The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures, edited by Mike Ashley; a peek at the forthcoming film, Sherlock Holmes; and the entire Holmes canon reviewed in several parts (look for Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, and Part VII).

Dobbs promises that more posts are yet come. Stay tuned.

Bill Crider, R.I.P.

Bill Crider warned us more than a year and a half ago that his remaining time among the living might be quite short, writing in his blog that he’d been diagnosed with “very aggressive” prostate cancer. “Looks bad,” he remarked in a July 2016 post. Yet it still came as something of a surprise last night when I read this Facebook message from his younger brother, Cox Robert “Bob” Crider:

My brother, Bill Crider, passed away this evening at 6:52 p.m. CST, Monday, February 12, 2018. It was a peaceful end to a strong body and intellectual mind.

During his three-decades-long writing career, Crider penned novels and short stories in a variety of genres. This English teacher turned author is probably best known for his humor-tinged mysteries starring Dan Rhodes, the necessarily resourceful sheriff of rural—and fictional—Blacklin County, Texas. (The opening entry in that series, 1986’s Too Late to Die, won him the Anthony Award for Best First Novel. A final, 24th installment, That Old Scoundrel Death, is due out later this year.) However, he also wrote science fiction, westerns, and horror yarns; produced a handful of books for younger readers (including 1990’s A Vampire Named Fred and its e-book sequel, A Werewolf Named Wayne); concocted, with Jack Davis, an entry in the long-running Nick Carter: Killmaster thriller series (1981’s The Coyote Connection); and even conspired with comedian/TV weatherman Willard Scott on a couple of cozy whodunits featuring—of course—a nationally recognized weather forecaster by the name of Stanley Waters. In an online interview from last November, Crider said, “I’ve written close to 100 books under both my own name and various pen names.”

Is it any wonder that media profiles of this Alvin, Texas, author so often referred to him as “prolific”?

Crider’s influence on the genre of crime and mystery fiction, though, actually pales in comparison to his impact on many of his fellow authors and readers. A frequent guest at the annual Bouchercon gatherings, and an avid supporter of other scribblers (I count myself as fortunate for having received a number of complimentary and encouraging e-mail notes from him over the years), Crider made numerous friends within the crime-fiction community. Mystery Fanfare’s Janet Rudolph describes him as “quiet, with a dry wit, warm, a true gentleman … Bill was always a class act and a true Renaissance man.” His Facebook page is awash today with memories of how Crider—seemingly always compassionate, attentive, generous, and knowledgeable—touched people’s hearts and made them laugh. “I don’t think I’ve ever met a kinder, gentler, more well-liked writer,” says author and Brash Books co-publisher Lee Goldberg. Another wordsmith, Richard Helms, calls Crider “a pal, a hell of a writer, one of the best of us.” And Seattle’s Vince Keenan, the co-author (with his wife, Rosemarie) of the Lillian Frost/Edith Head mysteries—published under their pseudonym, Renee Patrick—has this memory to share: “Bill was at the first-ever event Renee Patrick did on the road, making a point of driving in to Houston’s Murder by the Book so Rosemarie and I could count on seeing at least one friendly face. That’s the kind of person he was. I’ll miss talking books, movies, and baseball with him; I know how much it meant for him to see his Astros finally win a World Series last year. Safe travels, Bill. I’ll keep your books close at hand.”


Bill Crider poses in front of Edgar Allan Poe’s grave during Bouchercon 2008, held in Baltimore, Maryland.

Born in Mexia, Texas, on July 28, 1941, Bill Crider—cat lover, vintage music fan, all-star book collector, movies enthusiast, ardent blogger, voracious reader, poseur old grouch (his “Keep Off My Lawn” posts were persistently enjoyable), certified Dr Pepper addict, and the Web’s most popular authority on alligators and crocodiles—was 76 years old at the time of his demise. He outlived his wife, Judy, by slightly more than three years, but never forgot what it meant to be so loved.

I can’t think of a more fitting way to conclude this obituary than to quote something British writer Gary Dobbs said this morning: “Bill led a full life, died a courageous death, and his memory will be cherished not only by those who knew him personally but the many, many thousands of us to whom he offered the hand of digital friendship.”

FOLLOW-UP: Bill’s daughter, Angela Crider Neary‎, has posted this notice on his Facebook page: “A memorial service for Bill Crider will be held on Monday, February 19, at 1:00 p.m. at the First United Methodist Church in Alvin, Texas. In lieu of flowers, a donation to a public library of the donor’s choice would be appropriate.”

READ MORE: “Bill Crider,” by Jacqueline Carmichael (Mystery Scene); “Bill Crider (1941-2018),” by Jerry House (Jerry’s House of Everything); “Interview: Bill Crider,” by Ben Boulden (Gravetapping); “Bill Crider, and Some of His Work and Play, Including Some Short Stories: The FFB Crider Celebration Week” (Socialist Jazz).

Roger and Thee

One day after the death of actor Roger Moore at age 89, there continues to be a flood of discussion on the Web about this former star of The Saint, The Persuaders!, and a series of James Bond films.

Bill Koenig offers a nice appreciation of Moore in The Spy Commend that mentions how generous he was in complimenting other men who played the part of Agent 007. The New York Times’ A.O. Scott and author-blogger Gary Dobbs both seek to make the case that—in spite of criticism to the contrary—Moore made the best big-screen Bond. The Book Bond’s John Cox has posted a gallery of Bond novel fronts featuring Moore. And as others have done, the classic-film blog Silver Scenes effuses over the movie and TV performer’s comportment:

I think what appealed to me most about Roger was his stately bearing. He was a gentleman in an age of very few gentlemen. Tailored suits, the finest cuff-links, impeccable hair … he always dressed for the occasion. Sometimes that occasion was yachting on the Riviera, other times hosting a race in London. If one was to look up the word debonair in the Webster’s dictionary, “Sir Roger Moore” should be the definition. It was like a real baron, no—a prince—took time off from his royal duties to try acting for a lark, to have the pleasure of entertaining the masses. And what pleasure he gave us!

Finally, author Lee Goldberg—who, in his younger days, talked several times with Roger Moore on the set of A View to a Kill for Starlog Magazine (“He was such a nice man, so funny and self-effacing … with an amazing memory for names”)—posted a link from his Facebook page to the published results of their exchanges.

Expect to see more tributes to Moore in the coming days.

READ MORE: “Roger Moore, R.I.P.,” by Jason Whiton (Spy Vibe); “Roger Moore Dead: This Anecdote About the James Bond Actor Just Keeps Getting Better As You Read,” by Christopher Hooten (The Independent); “‘One of Nature’s True Gentlemen’: Your Roger Moore Stories” (The Guardian).

A Bagful of Goodies

• To commemorate Halloween, AbeBooks has assembled a collection of vintage fright novels. “They were all published before 1960,” the book-selling site explains, “and these books--some of them forgotten, many out-of-print--illustrate how authors and publishers tried to scare people in the days before JFK, The Beatles and everything else that came with the Swinging Sixties. You will find ghosts, monsters, witches, the undead, general strange happenings and a diverse range of supernatural elements in this selection. Some stories might not have aged as well as others--are tales of giant beetles and huge spiders really horrifying for a modern reader?” See for yourself.

• The Little Professor provides a rundown of “19th-century (and a few Edwardian) haunted house tales.” Works by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Margaret Oliphant, H.G. Wells, and Bram Stoker are all included.

• Retrospace recalls some “wicked reads” from the 1970s.

• Meanwhile, English author Kate Mosse (Sepulchre, The Winter Ghosts) writes in The Guardian about her 10 favorite ghost stories, a list that includes Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-tale Heart,” Edith Wharton’s “Bewitched,” and Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black. (Hat tip to The Campaign for the American Reader.)

• If you’re still stuck for reading material befitting Halloween, click on over to The Broke and the Bookish, Reading in Reykjavik, or Bookgasm for a few interesting ideas.

• Alternatively, turn to Bill Crider’s “Boppin’ at the High School Hop.” Or try out “Amanda,” by horror writer Juliette “Rizzy” Rodham.

• TV Confidential hosts a 15-minute-long “pitch episode” for The Munsters (1964-1966), shot in color and featuring only two of the cast monsters ... er, members who became so familiar from the finished series, Fred Gwynne and Al Lewis. Watch it here.

• Classic TV Showbiz offers scenes from the 1964 Halloween episode of Bewitched, the situation comedy in which Elizabeth Montgomery starred as spellbinding suburban witch with a twitchy nose, whose husband doesn’t want anyone else to know about her powers. Click here to see these scenes, with guest star Shelley Berman.

• Yes, you too can turn yourself into a zombie.

• Crime Time Preview reports that in honor of this occasion, BBC Radio 7 will unearth its 90-minute, 2007 adaptation of Loren D. Estleman’s Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula (1978) for an encore airing. The show is set to begin on Sunday at 9:30 p.m. GMT, and--if the usual rules apply--should be available for the next seven days. Listen to it here.

• Gary Dobbs is raising lots of spirits with his weekend-long “Fangs for the Memory” celebration of All Hallows’ Eve. Contents include a hair-raising homage to The Wolf Man, a compact history of cinematic spooks, and an interview with Shaun Hutson (Epitaph).

• Master of the horror film Wes Craven picks his top 10 scary movies (among them War of the Worlds, Psycho, and Don’t Look Now) for The Daily Beast. (Hat tip to Mystery Fanfare).

• The Classic Film and TV Café suggests satisfying today’s hunger for fearsome flicks with showings of The Shining or Village of the Damned.

• Still more “films that give you nightmares.”

• Ed Gorman’s “favorite horrific film”? The Seventh Victim (1943).

• For the male viewers out there, Nobody Move! showcases a beauteous bevy of “scream queens” from moviemaking’s past.

• She Blogged by Night has its own phantom-packed photo tribute to this occasion. Don’t miss the “Halloween cheesecake” posts.

• Three good pieces from Mercurie’s A Shroud of Thoughts: “The Golden Age of Horror Movies,” “The Second Golden Age of Horror Movies,” and “ This ... Is a Thriller,” a remembrance of Boris Karloff’s 1960-1962 TV anthology series, Thriller.

• Script-penning demons Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunston, contributors to the Saw series of big-screen horror movies, write in the Mulholland Books blog about “the culture of the scare.”

• The 1988 film Vampires on Bikini Beach is among the Halloween treasures, horrific and horrible, that you can watch from the safety of your computer screen this weekend, thanks to the Web site SlashControl. Also available: original Addams Family episodes and the beloved Peanuts special, It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.

• Sink your teeth into Evan Lewis’ gallery of Dracula film posters.

• What were trick-or-treaters wearing a century ago? National Geographic’s Web site provides a gallery of the ghoulish and weird. (Hat tip to Bill Crider’s Pop Culture Magazine.)

• Spooky fingernail paintings. (Hat tip to Women of Mystery.)

• Author Timothy Hallinan (The Queen of Patpong) explains why “Thais take their ghosts pretty seriously,” in a post for Murder Is Everywhere.

• Mystery Fanfare’s Janet Rudolph, who has recently put together a series of guest posts having to do with October 31, invited mystery writer and party planner Penny Warner to give readers instructions on “How to Host a Vampire Party.”

• Finally, in this era of easy mobility, it seems there are travel opportunities for every taste. The Virginia radio program With Good Reason recently sampled paranormal tours. (Hat tip to Elizabeth Foxwell.)

Free to Read, You and Me

Banned Books Week--an annual event that celebrates “the freedom to read and the importance of the First Amendment”--begins today, September 25, and runs through next Saturday, October 2. It’s amazing that in the 21st century, we’re still having to put up with people who challenge the value of literature, trying to impose their narrow-mindedness on every other reader.

And yet we do. As B.V. Lawson of In Reference to Murder notes, the American Library Association “received 4,312 challenges to books in their member libraries between 2001 and 2009: 1,413 for ‘sexually explicit’ material, 1,125 due to ‘offensive language,’ 897 challenges due to material deemed ‘unsuited to age group,’ 514 challenges due to ‘violence,’ 344 challenges due to ‘homosexuality,’ 109 materials were challenged because they were ‘anti-family,’ and 269 because of their ‘religious viewpoints.’” How ludicrous! As author Gary Dobbs commented on this occasion last year, “These people who seek to ban books from libraries are the PC brigade. They usually challenge books or ask the library to ban them with the best intentions in mind: to protect others, especially children, from difficult ideas and information. I’d much rather they piss off and protect us from their puerile nonsense.”

I agree. If you look over the list of most commonly challenged books in the United States, you find many classics (such as Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Call of the Wild, Brave New World, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Of Mice and Men), but also works that seem far too silly for anyone except those who value ideology over sense to bother complaining about (James and the Giant Peach, the Goosebumps series, Captain Underpants, etc.). It’s hard to take seriously folks who would spend so much energy campaigning in favor of literary censorship--and yet at the same time, decry (hypocritically) governmental intrusion into people’s affairs. But when we live in a country that still produces right-wing attorneys general who think it’s vitally important to cover up women’s breasts on 234-year-old state seals, you realize that we still have a whole lot of evolutionary development to go.

Express your freedom this week--read a banned book.

READ MORE: “The 11 Most Surprising Banned Books,” by Jessie Kunhardt and Amy Hertz (The Huffington Post).

“The Late Alfred Hitchcock Presents”

Gary Dobbs of The Tainted Archive reports that Britain’s BBC Radio 7 is “producing stories originally intended for the Alfred Hitchcock television series but rejected because of their rather gruesome nature. Actor Michael Roberts does a great impression of the later master director for the introduction to each story.”

Click here to find this series’ 15-minute opening episode, “The Waxwork,” by A.M. Burrage. It will remain available for your listening pleasure over the next week.

Bullet Points: Pre-Anniversary Edition

• Salon critic Heather Havrilesky proclaims that the buddy cops “dramedy,” The Good Guys--which previews tonight on FOX-TV at 8 p.m. and stars The West Wing’s Bradley Whitford in a mustache--“is about the right speed for summer TV.”

• This ought to give anyone planning to attend October’s Bouchercon in San Francisco some ideas: Ben Terrall (who I interviewed last spring about his father, noted crime writer Robert Terrall) has a new piece in the city’s Bay Guardian newspaper about San Francisco’s underbelly, as seen through the famous Dashiell Hammett Tour. You can read it here.

• By the way, I hope Bouchercon officials will organize groups of conventioneers to participate in Don Herron’s wonderful tour.

• Eric Beetner’s short story “Ditch,” originally published in ThugLit, appears to be the only work of crime fiction on the top-10 list of tales contending for this year’s StorySouth Million Writers Award. The reading public will choose the winner, so if you’re interested in voting, click here.

• Author Max Allan Collins reports that he’s “plugging away at Return to Perdition, which is at about the halfway point of its around 200 pages.” He adds that “This is the graphic novel finale to the Perdition saga, although not necessarily the last Perdition book.”

• Congratulations to The Lipstick Chronicles on its fifth birthday.

• After getting his feet wet with multi-part celebrations of The Saint and Sherlock Holmes, Gary Dobbs of The Tainted Archive is now preparing a similar blogfest centered around “the world of the TV cop show.” Included in the offerings, to be posted during the first weekend in June,

will be an interview with real-life Los Angeles police detective Paul Bishop, who writes the books and music blog Bish’s Beat.

• The cast of CBS-TV’s Hawaii Five-O reboot seems to be well in place. There’s even a preview of the show, currently available on YouTube (and embedded at right). I have to admit that, while it isn’t the original Jack Lord series, it doesn’t look half bad.

• Something tells me this fashion trend won’t last long.

• Mark Coggins’ latest P.I. August Riordan novel, The Big Wake-Up (Bleak House Books), has won top honors in the 2010 Independent Publishers Book Awards competition for Mystery/Suspense/Thriller fiction. There was a tie for second place between Death of a Bronx Cop, by Tom Walker (iUniverse), and Shamrock Alley, by Ronald Damien Malfi (Medallion Press, Inc.). Third place went to Dead Air, by Deborah Shlian and Linda Reid (Oceanview Publishing).

• Spinetingler Magazine has the cover art from Dennis Lehane’s forthcoming (in November) Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro novel, Moonlight Mile, plus a plot synopsis for this much-anticipated sequel to 1998’s Gone, Baby, Gone. Look for it all here.

• A perfect Christmas gift for every fan of The Avengers on your list.

• And this one is ideal for Ian Rankin followers.

• Release of Ellery Queen--The Complete Series on DVD has been postponed from August 24 to September 21. Don’t ask me why.

• Salon’s Laura Miller analyzes the Stieg Larsson phenomenon.

• Is it just my imagination, or is disgraced former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich becoming more ridiculous and irrelevant by the day? UPDATE: There’s more about Gingrich’s ludicrous rhetoric here.

• Actor Burt Reynolds is apparently planning a guest appearance on Burn Notice during the upcoming fourth season of that Miami-set USA Network series. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear that he’s been cast as an older B.L. Stryker, the Miami private eye he played for two years on a not-altogether-bad ABC-TV series back in 1989-1990.

• Interviews worth reading: The Powell’s Books blog talks with Scott Turow about his new sequel to Presumed Innocent, simply titled Innocent; J. Sydney Jones takes on Barbara Nadel, author of the Turkish Inspector İkmen series; and Craig Sisterson fires questions at Craig Russell, Scottish author of the Jan Fabel and Lennox thrillers.

• Meanwhile, for Bookdagger, Chris Ewan has recorded an interview in which he talks about his writing inspirations, protagonist Charlie Howard, and his latest novel, The Good Thief’s Guide to Vegas--already available in Britain, but not due out in the States until August.

• More woes for TNT-TV’s Southland.

• And from The Gumshoe Site comes word that “Robert J. Serling, older brother of [The Twilight Zone’s] Rod Serling, died on May 6 in Tucson, Arizona. The ex-UPI aviation editor wrote The President’s Plane Is Missing (Doubleday, 1967), which was made into a 1973 TV movie. Serling wrote other novels including its sequel, Air Force One Is Haunted (St. Martin’s, 1985), featuring Jeremy Haines, and McDermott’s Sky (Stein & Day, 1977). He was 92.”

Checking All the Corners

• It’s been a rather long wait between issues (the previous one came out last August), but there’s finally a new edition of Richard Helms’ Back Alley Webzine available. It includes stories by Stephen D. Rogers, Angela Zeman, and Nikki Dolson. Plus, you’ll find the sixth installment of Back Alley’s seven-part serialization of Frank Norris’ 1899 “naturalistic proto-noir novel,” McTeague. Read it all here.

• Christa Faust has unveiled the cover illustration for Choke Hold, her forthcoming sequel to 2007’s Money Shot. The artwork was done by frequent Hard Case Crime contributor Glen Orbik. You can see the cover for yourself right here.

• Beat to a Pulp’s new weekly short-story offering, “Contact Shots Are Bad Like That,” comes from American Midwesterner Derek Kelly.

• Black Mask magazine was so cool!

• By the way, did you know that crime-fiction editor Otto Penzler has assembled, for publisher Vintage Crime, an 1,168-page collection of yarns called The Black Lizard Big Book of Black Mask Stories (due in bookstores in mid-September)? That’s the same page count as his outstanding 2007 anthology, The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps.

• Despite widespread concerns to the contrary, the critically heralded cop series Southland has been renewed for a third season by TNT-TV. Crimespree Cinema reports that “The network has ordered 10 episodes for the third season, which is slated to begin airing in January 2011.”

• Drat! I missed last night’s episode of TV Confidential, the Internet radio series (hosted by Ed Robertson and Frankie Montiforte) that often includes interviews with people who were involved in classic crime dramas for the large or small screens. Last night’s installment featured Emmy Award-winning director Paul Bogart, among whose credits are The Defenders, Get Smart, and two memorable James Garner flicks: Marlowe (1969) and Skin Game (1971). If, like me, you forgot to tune in, rest assured that that the episode will be rebroadcast this coming Friday, April 30, at 7 p.m. ET/PT on Share-a-Vision Radio, KSAV.org.

• This Showtime-TV mash-up of the 2008 James Bond film, Quantum of Solace, with 1961’s West Side Story is pretty clever.

• Wednesday, April 28, will mark the 80th birthday of series character Nancy Drew. As the Nancy Drew Sleuth Unofficial Web Site notes, the first three books featuring the precocious girl detective from River Heights were published on that date back in 1930. To celebrate this occasion, the Poisoned Pen Bookstore in Scottsdale, Arizona, has scheduled a party to be attended by Jenn Fisher, author of Clues for Real Life: The Wit and Wisdom of Nancy Drew (2007). The festivities will include giveaways and other prizes, and should get started at the Poisoned Pen at 7 p.m. on the 28th. (Hat tip to Lesa’s Book Critiques.)

• Oh, yeah, what can go wrong with this idea?

• Gary Dobbs celebrates TV detectives of the 1970s.

• Some interviews worth checking out: Sons of Spade blogger Jochem van der Steen talks with Tom Schreck, author of the Duffy Dombrowski mysteries; J. Sydney Jones chats up Laurie R. King, whose latest Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes novel is The God of the Hive; Thomas Kaufman (Drink the Tea) submits to questioning by Spinetingler Magazine; and Stephen D. Rogers fires a few queries at Thomas Perry, whose new standalone thriller, Strip, has just been released. Meanwhile, Keith Rawson conducts a video interview with Ace Atkins, during which they discuss Atkins’ brand-new novel, Infamous, as well as “the future of his popular P.I. character, Nick Travers, and his upcoming series of cotemporary crime novels.”

• Sigh ... Another author I’d never heard of before.

• At the root of Arizona’s hateful and “immoral” new anti-immigrant legislation, is it just all about Republicans trying to hold onto their endangered power in the state?

• Winners of the annual Reviewers’ Choice Awards.

• Lovely actress Marisa Tomei (who I always think of in her fabulous role in My Cousin Vinny) has apparently signed on to play Matthew McConaughey’s wife in the film adaptation of Michael Connelly’s 2005 novel, The Lincoln Lawyer.

• And just five years ago, YouTube received its first video upload.

Bullet Points: Mid-Olympics Edition

• It’s been just shy of a year since The Rap Sheet racked up its 500,000th page view. But sometime early Friday morning, that little red counter at the bottom of the right-hand column did one better, registering this blog’s 750,000th page view.

• Following the news that Aftermath, Peter Robinson’s 2001 suspense novel starring Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks, is going to be adapted for British television, Gary Dobbs talks with the author about the Banks books, his lack of involvement in the two-part TV drama, and his next novel, Bad Boy (due out in August).

• Meanwhile, it appears that the late Michael Dibdin’s protagonist, Italian cop Aurelio Zen, is also headed for the small screen.

• The guest of honor at the 2010 Killer Nashville conference, August 20-22, will be Jeffery Deaver, author of the forthcoming Lincoln Rhyme novel, The Burning Wire.

• Journalist-novelist Matt Beynon Rees (who recently wrote on this page about Georges Simenon’s The Saint-Fiacre Affair) has some casting suggestions for anybody who might like to adapt his new book, The Fourth Assassin, for the big-screen. Musing at My Book, the Movie, he says that the role of his Palestinian detective, Omar Yussef, should go to none other than Tony Shalhoub of Monk fame.

• New in Beat to a Pulp: “Coercion,” by Mark Boss.

• Another excellent tribute to the late Robert B. Parker, this one coming from fellow author Tim Byrd. (Hat tip to Bill Crider.)

• Oh, yeah, this couldn’t possibly lead to trouble, right?

• Seattle’s fourth annual Noir City film festival began last night and runs through this coming Thursday. Here’s the schedule of events. And Vince Keenan promises thoughtful coverage.

• Hard Case Crime editor Charles Ardai tells Stephen D. Rogers that he’s currently “working on the new TV series Haven for SyFy in a writing and producing capacity.” Haven is apparently based on the novella The Colorado Kid, by Stephen King, which Hard Case published back in 2005.

• Craig McDonald’s first Hector Lassiter novel, Head Games (2007), is to be reinterpretated as a graphic novel, due out in 2011.

• With this 1960 paperback book cover being such a stunner, I’m sorry to hear that the story inside isn’t better at grabbing the reader’s attention.

• Most of the news we’ve heard lately about President Barack Obama’s 2009 economic stimulus campaign has had to do with Republican’t hyocrisy on the issue. But it seems the bigger story is how successful those Democratic-led efforts have been. More on that here, here, here, and here.

• Short-story writer Paul D. Brazill has recently embarked on a succession of interviews with people involved in the crime-fiction community. Here he talks with Maxim Jakubowski, British publisher and former bookstore proprietor; and here he chats up Aldo Calcagno, veteran Web fiction editor.

• Thrillers, Killers ’n’ Chillers, the year-old Webzine co-edited by Col Bury and Matt Hilton, recently won the Preditors & Editors Readers Poll for Fiction Magazines.

• Today brings much-anticipated release of Barnaby Jones: Season One on DVD. I was never a Barnaby Jones fan, but it’s been so long since that Buddy Ebsen detective drama went off the air--30 years ago this coming April 3--that I might just have to sample the show again, to see what it was I liked (and didn’t like) about it.

• The challenges of interviewing James Ellroy.

• Jim Winter is absolutely right about Tiger Woods’ personal life being none of our damn business. “Tiger Woods does not owe you an apology,” he writes. “He owes Mrs. Woods an apology. Apparently, she’s already accepted it. I could be wrong, and if I am, so what? It’s nobody’s business but Mr. and Mrs. Woods’ and their children’s. Not yours. Not mine.”

• Keith Raffel will appear on tomorrow’s edition of Press: Here--which he describes as “Silicon Valley’s version of Meet the Press”--to talk about “the suitability of the Valley as a setting for crime fiction” and, of course, his latest novel set there, Smasher. Press: Here begins on Sunday at 9 a.m. on KNTV, the San Francisco Bay Area’s NBC affiliate (cable channel 3). If you can’t wait to watch it then, just click here.

• Spinetingler Magazine is going through some pretty significant changes, beginning with a redesign that makes it look far more newsy than it did before. In a short post, non-fiction editor Brian Lindenmuth explains that “We are in beta at the moment, but as changes are happening we are posting reviews.”

• American right-wingers have become such nutty extremists about terrorism and torture over the last 10 years, that Ronald Reagan would now be considered a liberal on the matter.

• And a couple of interviews worth reading: J. Sydney Jones talks with Cara Black, author of the new Murder in the Palais Royal; and John Kenyon chats with Steve Hamilton about the latter’s recently published The Lock Artist. Meanwhile, Keith Rawson talks on video with T. Jefferson Parker about his new Iron River. And Jeff Rutherford’s latest Reading and Writing podcast interview is with suspense novelist Stephen White (The Siege).

Of Hype, Holmes, and Haunts

• First, Mystery Scene magazine brought in as contributors Lynn Kaczmarek and Chris Aldrich, following the closure of their Mystery News tabloid. Now, MS editor Kate Stine is touting a deal that adds author Lawrence Block to her stable of writers. His new column, “The Murders in Memory Lane,” will debut in the upcoming holiday issue of Mystery Scene. In it, says Stine, “This hard-hitting, whip-smart writer will share anecdotes, insights, and appreciations of the many people he’s met in his six-decade-long literary career.”

• After successfully presenting a weekend-long load of Saint-related posts in September, actor, novelist, and blogger Gary Dobbs has announced that he’ll try to do something similar with Sherlock Holmes during the weekend of November 7.

• Several familiar crime movie posters feature in this set.

• Actress Collin Wilcox, who played Mayella Ewell, the young white woman who falsely accused a black man (played by Brock Peters) of rape in the 1962 film To Kill a Mockingbird, has died of brain cancer at age 74. Writer and film historian Stephen Bowie has posted a nice remembrance of Wilcox (who is not to be confused with American mystery novelist Collins Wilcox).

• Holy nostalgia, Batman! I was just a kid when this film was released in 1966, and I went to see it with my parents and my brother at a drive-in theater. I had a cut-out of the familiar Batman logo from the TV series taped to the back window of our Volvo station wagon, and tried to create a Bat-signal with it using a flashlight. It didn’t work, of course. But I didn’t care. I got to see the movie, and that’s all that really mattered that night.

• From the Weird News file.

• I wasn’t a fan of the 1979 TV series A Man Called Sloane, which starred Robert Conrad (formerly of The Wild Wild West and Assignment: Vienna) as a freelance espionage agent. But I have to admire Christopher Mills’ commitment to watching all 12 episodes of that show in order to write about each and every one of them for his blog Spy-fi Channel. Mills’ review of the last ep, “The Shangri-la Syndrome,” was posted this morning. You can catch up with all of the previous installments here.

• I’ve pretty much given up on the latest U.S. TV season. It seems to offer just more of the same, and (thanks in part to Jay Leno’s hogging of the 10-11 p.m. NBC spot) too few hours in which to try anything new and different. (Hell, I’d settle for something tried and true, like a classic-style private eye show.) But I’m at least willing to give White Collar, the new USA Network series, a shot. Even if it does sound like a rip-off of Robert Wagner’s It Takes a Thief. White Collar debuts this Friday at 10 p.m.

• Jeri Westerson’s Crispin Guest medieval mystery series (Veil of Lies, Serpent in the Thorns) gets a cool new video trailer.

• And with just over a week to go before Halloween, the Web site Dread Central has come up with a “list of books and some movies every horror fan should at least take a look at, if not outright add to your book or DVD library.” More here. (Hat tip to Bill Crider.)

Out for a Little Site-Seeing

• Following through on his promise, The Tainted Archive’s Gary Dobbs has spent this weekend pumping out posts related to The Saint, Simon Templar. There’s almost too much stuff to list, but a few things worth checking out: a full episode of The Saint radio series, starring Vincent Price; Cullen Gallagher’s report on “a recent live re-creation of one of those old-time radio Saints”; a review of The Saint in New York (1935); an interview with Ian Dickerson, a friend of Saint creator Leslie Charteris and now secretary of The Saint Club; a fond look back at The Saint Magazine, and ... well, so much more. Click here to read the full load.

• It looks as if an A-Team movie is finally coming together.

• People (like me) are still registering for the San Francisco Bouchercon in October 2010, but registration is also open now for the 2011 St. Louis convention.

• I almost forgot that today’s marks the 150th anniversary of the last duel in San Francisco, pitting a pro-slavery judge against an anti-slavery U.S. senator.

• This week’s short-story offering at Beat to a Pulp is “Cedar Mountain,” by Connecticut writer George Miller Jr.

• For fans of author Mary Stewart.

• In addition to Lyn Hamilton’s death, last week also brought the ends to two other people with crime-fiction connections. Writer-producer George Eckstein worked on The Fugitive, The Name of the Game, Banacek, and many other familiar U.S. TV series. And Larry Gelbart, though he’s best known as one the brains behind M*A*S*H, also won an Edgar Award for the musical City of Angels.

• I forgot to mention that last month’s Killer Nashville conference produced a trio of award recipients. Read all about them here.

• Is Washington, D.C., really “wired” for Republicans--no matter how silly and “freakish” they act sometimes?

• This is Agatha Christie Week, at least according to Aussie Kerrie Smith from Mysteries in Paradise. She’s coaxed a variety of like-minded bloggers to celebrate “the life and work of Agatha Christie with a blog tour where people undertake to put up a special post on their own site, starting today. Our tour will extend for 11 days.” A list of the participants can be found here. By the way, Tuesday--September 15--would have been author Christie’s 119th birthday, had she not passed away in 1976.

• And in case you ever thought that you could finally catch up with all of the good books being published in the world ... forget it!

Cruising the Blogosphere

• Sarah Weinman tells Stieg Larsson fans that they can stop holding their breaths for a fourth installment of Larsson’s “Millennium Trilogy,” following the publication in Britain later this year of The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. She writes that “the 200 or so pages of the fourth book in the series, left unfinished by Larsson’s death in 2004, won’t ever see the light of day ...”

• Here are a couple of TV main title sequences I thought I’d never see again: Banyon and The Bold Ones.

• Is the 1985-1988 ABC-TV series Spenser: For Hire ready for resurrection? Via Lee Goldberg’s blog comes news, from Spenser creator Robert B. Parker, that “we are in negotiation for a remake of the Spenser: For Hire series to be produced by Sony/Dreamworks, and shown on TNT. There is often a slip twixt cup and lip in Los Angeles, but so far things are promising.” Don’t count me among those enthused by this news. While I enjoyed the first year of Spenser, starring Robert Urich and Avery Brooks, I have grown tired of the books and, as a result, less enthusiastic about the character overall. There’s been too much emphasis over the years on all that manly “personal code” bullshit and insufficient attention given to developing fresh stories and--imagine this--letting Spenser and his cohorts age gracefully. To work, a new Spenser TV drama would have to start from scratch and undo some of the conventions Parker has built into his series. With the author significantly involved in the project, I doubt those big changes would be possible.

• My recent mention on this page of John Wayne’s 1974 crime thriller, McQ, started film and pop culture critic Vince Keenan thinking about other feature films shot in Seattle. Especially Harry in Your Pocket (1973). Read more here.

• Western writer Jack Martin (né Gary Dobbs) provides the latest short story at Beat to a Pulp. It’s called “The Devil’s Right Hand.”

• Speaking of updates: The Summer 2009 edition of Mysterical-E has just been posted, with contributions from Albert Tucher, Jeff Markowitz, Jim Winter, and B.J. Bourg, among others. The July edition of The Big Thrill, produced by the International Thriller Writers, has also gone up, offering myriad short book reviews and an interview with Jonathan Kellerman (True Detectives). And finally, you’ll find the new June issue of I Love a Mystery here, featuring reviews of Michael Stanley’s The Second Death of Goodluck Tinubu, Ian Pears’ Stone’s Fall, and other fresh crime fiction.

• Designer Michael Fusco talks about creating cover art for Pegasus Books’ latest editions of two Chester Himes novels--both of which are worth adding to your collection. Look here for the interview.

• For the person who just can’t get enough of Isaac Hayes’ Academy Award-winning Shaft theme.

• Robert Mitchum’s Night of the Hunter = noir gold.

• Per the I Am a Tie-In Writer blog: “Third annual presentation of the International Association of Media-Tie-in Writers (IAMTW) ‘Scribe’ Awards, honoring excellence in tie-in writing in such notable franchises as CSI, Criminal Minds, The X-Files, Star Trek, Stargate, Star Wars, and Dr. Who, will be held on Friday, July 24, 3-4:30 p.m. at Comic-Con in San Diego in Room 4.”

• On the subject of tie-in novels, this item comes from
Mystery Book News:

The Hollywood Reporter is reporting that ABC television will promote the second season of Castle by publishing a mystery novel “written” by the series lead, Richard Castle (played by Nathan Fillion).

Titled Heat Wave, the first chapter will be available on ABC.com on August 10th. Additional chapters will be posted weekly for 10 weeks. The real author of the book has not been identified.

• Nick Stone interviews fellow author Stav Sherez about his latest novel, The Black Monastery, the return of Dutch Detective Van Hijn, his three favorite cults, and ... uh, cheesecake recipes.

• It seems British hard-boiled writer Peter Cheyney’s Swedish publisher raided the files of paperback artist Robert McGinnis in order to produce its own covers of several of Cheyney’s FBI agent Lemmy Caution novels during the 1940s and ’50s. Of the four jackets featured at this link, the top three all carry McGinnis illustrations that originally appeared on other books.

• Scotland on Sunday catches up with former Man from U.N.C.L.E. co-star David McCallum to talk about his onetime fame playing Illya Kuryakin (the “blond Beatle”), his dwindling connection with Scotland, and his present work on the less-than-flashy American TV series NCIS. Read it all here.

• A reminder from the Writer’s Almanac: “It was on this day in 1731 that Ben Franklin founded the first circulating library, a forerunner to the now ubiquitous free public library. He started it as a way to help settle intellectual arguments among his group of Philadelphia friends, the Junto, a group of civic-minded individuals gathered together to discuss the important issues of their day.”

• And meet the inspiration for Amelia Peabody Emerson, Elizabeth Peters’ historical archaeologist-detective.