From the Et Cetera File

• Today beings Round Three of Jen Forbus’ “World’s Favorite Detective” tournament. There are still 16 fictional crime fighters in contention, some of them placed in quite inconvenient pairings (How, for instance, does one choose between Harry Bosch and Alan Banks?). You can vote for your favorites here.

• There are also a couple of birthdays worth noting today. It’s the 79th birthday of William Shatner, the Canadian-born star of Star Trek, Barbary Coast, T.J. Hooker, and Boston Legal. This would also have marked my father’s 86th birthday, had he not succumbed to prostate cancer seven years ago. I miss you, Dad.

• Do Some Damage’s Steve Weddle interviews J.T. Ellison, author of The Cold Room, the fourth and latest Detective Taylor Jackson novel.

• Many readers may not remember this, but after the unfortunate failure of his 1972 historical private-eye series, Banyon, actor Robert Forster was brought back to television in a short-lived (13-episode) series called Nakia, which had him playing a Native American deputy sheriff in the Southwest. I haven’t seen the main title sequence to Nakia in years, but Lee Goldberg has just posted it in his blog.

• Oh, no! Not another TV series coming to the big screen! The show to be adapted this time is 77 Sunset Strip, a Roy Huggins-created private-eye drama that starred Efrem Zimbalist Jr. and ran on ABC from 1958 to 1964.

• Now, here’s a TV series I look forward to seeing.

• TV Shows on DVD says that Season Three of the USA Network spy drama Burn Notice should be available in DVD format on June 1.

• Congratulations to Gerard Brennan for having co-edited the forthcoming Irish mythology anthology, Requiems for the Departed, which is also due out on June 1.

• You say you want to revel in Agatha Christie book covers? Well, Steve Holland of the Bear Alley blog offers up a cavalcade of them.

• Janet Rudolph brings us the rundown of this year’s mystery-fiction finalists for the Lambda Literary Awards. Winners will be announced during a ceremony in New York City on May 27.

• When crime writers go bad.

• And after last night’s hard-won victory for health-care reform in the U.S. House of Representatives, The New Republic is declaring that Barack Obama “has sealed his reputation as a president of great historical import.” The Washington Monthly’s Steven Benen has more to say here and here on Obama’s combativeness, while Salon applauds House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for her no less important “legislative savvy--mastery, really.” At the same time, Republicans--who tried desperately over the last year to block any legislation that would rein in the power of insurance companies--are assessing the extent of their failure to participate in health-care restructuring. As former Bush speechwriter David Frum wrote yesterday, the success of landmark health-care reform is the “most crushing legislative defeat” for the right wing in half a century.