Thursday Trifles

• The 100th anniversary of Elmore Leonard’s birth will be October 11 of this year. Despite the fact that the author died in 2013 at age 87, this coming centenary provides an ideal excuse to reissue some of his best-remembered works. As Barry Forshaw notes in Crime Time, publisher Penguin will bring out new editions of Swag, The Switch, and Rum Punch in June, with more works to follow in its Penguin Modern Classics Crime series. (Hat tip to In Reference to Murder.)

• Dashiell Hammett’s time spent as a soldier in Alaska is not a subject with which most readers are familiar. Which is undoubtedly why historian David Reamer looked into that story for the latest entry in his weekly series for the Anchorage Daily News.

• In CrimeReads, author Danielle Teller (Forged) makes the case that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby was a con artist. “He seeks cheat codes for acquiring wealth,” she explains, “and takes on a false persona at a young age ..., and he displays many of the narcissistic and psychopathic features associated with con artists, including glib charm, grandiosity, need for admiration, impulsivity, egotism, manipulation, and of course, a willingness to lie.”

• Fictionist and genre historian Martin Edwards has published what he says is his “first ever obituary written for a national newspaper”: a choice remembrance of Peter Lovesey for The Guardian.

• In a new pair of posts, Paul Vidich (The Poet’s Game) first celebrates the career of now 95-year-old spy novelist Len Deighton, and then selects “six novels to highlight Deighton’s considerable talent.”

• Another Miami Vice movie? I hope this one, to be directed by Joseph Kosinski (Spiderhead, F1), will be better than Michael Mann’s underdeveloped 2006 filmed based on his 1980s TV series Miami Vice.

• Reporter and animal rights activist Cleveland Amory spent 13 years (1963-1976) as a television critic for TV Guide magazine. I remember reading and often enjoying his columns (which I have occasionally drawn quotes from for The Rap Sheet). But Amory, himself, did not always enjoy the subjects of said critiques. A case in point: his “scorchingly bad [1965] review of the cult-classic television series The Man from U.N.C.L.E.,” which Ben Bolden posted recently in his blog.

• This coming Sunday, May 11, Americans will be celebrating Mother’s Day. Time again for Janet Rudolph to update her list of crime and mystery novels linked to that annual holiday. Kathi Daley’s The Mother's Day Mishap, Jane Haddam’s Murder Superior, and Selma Eichler’s Murder Can Upset Your Mother are among the many titles (novels and short-story collections) mentioned. More here.

• Finally, here are two interviews worth your attention: Sarah Weinman talks with Kate Summerscale, author of the new-in-the-States true-crime history The Peepshow, which revisits the bizarre case of London serial killer Reg Christie; and Jeri Westerson chats up audiobook narrator Noah James Butler, whom she calls the “Man of a Thousand Voices.”