The winner of this year’s Munsey Award (presented annually to “a deserving person who has given of himself or herself for the betterment of the pulp community, be it through disseminating knowledge about the pulps or through publishing or other efforts to preserve and to foster interest in the pulp magazines we all love and enjoy”) will be announced during a special presentation on Saturday night.• Nero Wolfe’s brownstone found in New York City!
• This just seems wrong to me.
• To lift your spirits at the beginning of yet another work week: one of the classic scenes from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid; the deceptively entertaining trailer for the horrendous 1998 film remake of that famous TV series, The Avengers; and the hum-able theme from the Richard Boone series Have Gun--Will Travel.
• The blog I Have Grave News likes BBC-TV’s new Sherlock.
• National Public Radio offers an exceptional package of reports on the life and journalistic contributions of newsman Daniel Schorr, who succumbed last Friday at age 93.
• This last weekend brought an announcement of this year’s Scribe Award winners, prizes given to movie and television tie-in works.
• Some good news from Comic Con: English actress Indira Varma, who did such a fine turn as beautiful wife Niobe on HBO-TV’s Rome, is set to join the cast of ABC-TV’s Human Target, appearing ex-assassin Christopher Chance’s new boss. “She plays a woman who’s married to a ‘Paul Allen’ type, who dies under mysterious circumstances,” executive producer Matthew Miller told reporters. “She decides that the team has some value and she takes it over. She becomes a female Charlie [Townsend], giving the guys access to a billionaire’s toys--her jets, cars. It’ll give the show an international feel.”
• A preview of Dexter’s fifth TV season. The Miami-set HBO series is set to begin airing again on September 26.
• As CBS-TV readies its reboot version of the classic series Hawaii Five-O for a debut in mid-September, word comes from The HMSS Weblog that “the original 1969 Hawaii Five-O soundtrack album will be re-released digitally and on CD.”
• Shameful and insulting.
• The newest short story in Beat to a Pulp, a rather unusual one called “The Little Boy Inside,” was written by New York physician Glenn Gray.
• Sadly, Bill Pronzini’s Nameless Detective (featured in the new novel Betrayers) doesn’t appear on The Guardian’s list of “ten of the best nameless protagonists in literature.”
5 comments:
Hey, Hammett's Continental Op doesn't appear on the nameless list either!
You're absolutely right, Mark. Both are pretty glaring omissions. What was The Guardian's John Mullan thinking?
Cheers,
Jeff
He was evidently thinking literature with a capital L, not genre detective fiction. In other words the usual putdown of the mystery/crime field.
Glad it only took the LA Times 14 years to find the plaque at 454 West 35th St. in New York marking the site of Nero Wolfe's brownstone. According to the Wolfe Pack - which placed the plaque there - the New York Times discovered it five years ago and put it in their literary map of New York.
Oh - and I agree with the comments about both Nameless and the Continental Op. They should be on any list of the best "unnamed" detectives.
Harrumph.
As for the great trailer to the awful movie The Avengers, have you ever read the movie novelization by Julie Wallin Kaewert? The book included much of the story that was edited out of the film. I had read the book before I saw the movie which allowed me, unlike most others watching the movie, to actually understand what was going on and why.
michael
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