Let’s Take It from the Top

I’m devoting most of today to work on my long-neglected novel. But there are a few crime-fiction-related news bits worth passing along:

• The Fall 2007 issue of Byron Quertermous’ Demolition Magazine has been posted. There’s a pretty impressive lineup of authors contributing work here, including Scott Wolven (“October”), Patricia Abbott (“Careful”), Frederick Zackel (“White Man Sings the Blues”), and Tony Black (“Take It Outside”). The full load is available here.

• Mystery*File’s Steve Lewis showcases more than half a century’s worth of paperback covers of Erle Stanley Gardner’s bestselling Perry Mason tales, from the “subdued and far from lurid” Pocket edition fronts of the 1940s, through the seductive female model covers of the 1960s, to the sharper, more retro-style jackets of the 1980s and ’90s. You can scan them all in two posts, here and here.

• The Rap Sheet recently convinced Irish novelist Declan Burke (The Big O) to answer a series of questions he regularly puts to other writers. Now, Shots’ Tony Black interrogates Burke about his dear wife’s influence on his prose, his move from first-person to third-person storytelling, and the leap of faith he took in producing a novel that “UK publishers said wasn’t ‘commercial enough,’” Read their whole exchange here.

• Welcoming Vintage/Black Lizard’s new editions of several Ross Macdonald titles that have long been out of print, Bookgasm’s Bruce Grossman writes glowingly today of The Way Some People Die, originally published in 1951. The new Vintage covers, he notes, are “a huge improvement over the other Macdonald books they have put out ... or maybe I’m just a sucker for black-and-white photos of girls smoking.” Click here for Grossman’s full assessment.

• A few months ago, The Rap Sheet’s Ali Karim interviewed British author Richard Morgan on the subject of his latest “future noir” novel, Black Man (retitled Thirteen in the States). Now, January Magazine contributor Cameron Hughes goes one-on-one with Morgan again, this time for CHUD.com. Find the results here.

• Steve Brewer puts his latest novel, Cutthroat, to Marshal Zeringue’s Page 69 Test. Results to be found here.

• And finally, Robert B. Parker lets loose with one of his rare blog entries, updating us on the status of both Tom Selleck’s latest Jesse Stone teleflick (“shooting in Nova Scotia”) and the Ed Harris big-screen version of his western standalone Appaloosa (it “begins principal photography in Santa Fe in a couple of weeks”). He also reveals something I, for one, didn’t know: that his 1994 generational novel, All Our Yesterdays, about a family of Boston cops making their sometimes violent way through the 20th century, was at one time slated to be filmed as a TV mini-series. “Which of course didn’t work out,” Parker notes, laconically.