Bullet Points: Wolves and Batman Edition

• Stef Penney’s 19th-century Canadian thriller, The Tenderness of Wolves, has won the 2008 Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award, given out last night during festivities at the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival. The full story is here, and a list of Penney’s influential competitors for this commendation can be found here. (Hat tip to Mike Stotter’s Shotsmag Confidential).

• Noir of the Week’s latest cinematic pick is Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, the 1950 adaptation (starring James Cagney and Barbara Payton) of Horace McCoy’s 1948 novel of that same name. McCoy is better known, of course, for writing They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1936). Novelist Max Allan Collins chose the book Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye as part of The Rap Sheet’s first-anniversary feature collection of tributes to criminally overlooked or unjustly forgotten mystery and thriller fiction. See his write-up here.

• Boston novelist Linda Barnes, author of the soon-to-be-published private eye Carlotta Carlyle mystery, Lie Down With the Devil, is the latest contributor to Moments in Crime, publisher St. Martin’s Minotaur’s blog. Her posts haven’t been well catalogued (the one introducing her, for instance, is labeled as about Linda L. Richards), but so far you can find them here, here, and here. By the way, I forgot to mention that Charles Finch (A Beautiful Blue Death) preceded Barnes as a guest at Moments in Crime, writing a great deal of interesting stuff about the Victorian era.

• The Lineup: Poems on Crime, about which editor Gerald So wrote recently on this page, is looking for contributions to its next edition. Details are available here.

• New Orleans writer Julie Smith and Portland, Oregon, author Chelsea Cain are the latest two subjects of National Public Radio’s “Crime in the City” series. The Smith interview can be heard here, while Cain speaks here.

• Jeri Westerson, author of the forthcoming medieval mystery Veil of Lies, is interviewed by Julia Spencer-Fleming right here.

• What’s “the best worst [James] Bond film”? A hint, excerpted from Jamie J. Weinman’s write-up in Something Old, Nothing New: “You probably are familiar with the story behind it, how after George Lazenby quit, the producers lined up John Gavin to play James Bond, but United Artists decided that they’d pay Sean Connery literally anything he wanted to be Bond one more time.” More here.

• Speaking of all things Bond, the London Times has put together a handy 100-year timeline of creator Ian Fleming’s life and the continuing life of his British super agent. (Hat tip to Bill Crider.).

• The final cover art is now available for the DVD release of Nash Bridges: The First Season, due out in October.

• Another TV series looks like it’s bound for the big screen. Only this time, it’s British. According to TV Squad, “Universal Pictures will be adapting the 1999 BBC series Second Sight which launched the career of Clive Owen. It will be produced by Angry Film’s Don Murphy and Susan Montford. The story is about a homicide detective named Ross Tanner who suffers from a degenerative eye illness that leads to blindness and hallucinations. As a result, he must rely more on his intuition to solve crimes.” Read the whole story here.

• Everybody knows about former President Bill Clinton being a crime fiction fan. But Woodrow Wilson, too? Elizabeth Foxwell quotes the 28th president as writing in a letter, “I read detective stories to forget, as a man would get drunk!”

• And since the latest Caped Crusader movie, The Dark Knight, debuts in American theaters today, it’s only fitting that I should conclude with an associated item. Check out this piece from Scientific American magazine: “Why Batman Could Exist--But Not for Long.” Nowhere near as much fun as Larry Niven’s classic essay, “Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex” (which assessed Superman’s procreative potential), but nonetheless worthy of a look on this of all days. (Hat tip to Scott D. Parker.)