Audio clips of Sara Paretsky, Laura Lippman, Valerie Wilson Wesley.

Over at Chicago's Open Books Radio, there is new audio posted from interviews with Sara Paretsky and Laura Lippman by Booklist's Donna Seaman. Other interviews of potential interest include Valerie Wilson Wesley.

Michael Connelly tonight on Thacker Mountain Radio.

Author Michael Connelly appears on Mississippi's Thacker Mountain Radio on WUMS "Rebel Radio" 92.1 tonight at 6 pm CDT; the program will be rebroadcast on Saturday at 7 pm CDT on Mississippi Public Radio.

Happy birthday, Fredric Brown.

Fredric Brown, Edgar winner for The Fabulous Clipjoint (1947) featuring the sleuthing Ambrose Hunter and his nephew Ed, was born today in Cincinnati in 1906. He was well known for his writings in the pulps, and a few of his works were adapted for the screen: "Madman's Holiday" became the film Crack-up (1946), The Screaming Mimi became a film for Columbia (1958), and "Arena" became an episode of Star Trek. He also wrote for Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

"We ain't great. We're just some guys from Jersey."

This week, Overlook Press publishes in paperback P. F. Kluge's Eddie and the Cruisers; this whodunit features the mysterious demise of a charismatic lead singer and the disappearance of studio tapes. It spawned a 1983 film with Michael Paré and Tom Berenger as well as a top 10 single by John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band ("On the Dark Side"). Its sequel, Eddie Lives, Kluge calls "a talent-free embarrassment."

Happy birthday, Enid Bagnold.

Enid Bagnold (aka Lady Roderick Jones) was born today in Rochester, UK, in 1889. Best known for National Velvet (1935), she also wrote poetry and plays such as the Tony-nominated The Chalk Garden (1955). During World War I she was fired from her job as a nurse when she published A Diary without Dates (1918), a moving and sometimes scathing account of her time at the Royal Herbert Hospital, and her service as an ambulance driver for the FANY (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry) is reflected in her novel The Happy Foreigner (1920).

Ian Fleming, Daphne du Maurier this week on BBC Radio 7.

Ian Fleming's Casino Royale and Daphne du Maurier's Jamaica Inn are two of the works featured this week on BBC Radio 7. Go here for the schedule or to listen.

Vintage radio commercials, including "Lucky Beer."

Online at the Library of American Broadcasting at the University of Maryland, you can listen to various audio clips from radio commercials of the late 1950s and early 1960s, such as "Top Value Stamps (1960)—Only 15,000 books get you a split-level ranch house in New Rochelle!" and "Ingram Gasoline (1958)—98 octane! What did people drive in 1958, Indy Cars?"

Jay Gatsby and Lew Archer.

There's an interesting article posted online, "Ross Macdonald's Marked Copy of The Portable F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Study in Influence," by Robert F. Moss. In it, Moss compares and contrasts Jay Gatsby and Lew Archer and the lives of Fitzgerald and Macdonald; he also discusses Macdonald's annotations in The Portable F. Scott Fitzgerald (ed. Dorothy Parker), which suggest that Macdonald was seriously studying the craft of Fitzgerald's writing. The article also includes photographs of two pages of Macdonald's notes.

Chandler: Producers have "the morals of a goat."

From the Atlantic archives: a pungent piece by Raymond Chandler, "Writers in Hollywood" (November 1945), in which he discusses the writer's lot in Tinseltown and the atmosphere of a film as "an endless contention of tawdry egos." Wonderful prose.

Pulp fiction poster art by students.

The University of Buffalo is featuring a fun online exhibit "Student Poster Art: Pulp Fiction and Pop Culture at UB."

About the photo: 2008 poster by Katherine Muto.

Freeling: Allingham's Tiger in the Smoke is "deplorable trash."

I picked up Nicolas Freeling's Criminal Convictions: Errant Essays on Perpetrators of Literary License (1994), but found little within that I could embrace. Anthony Berkeley Cox's The Poisoned Chocolates Case? "Arid." Dashiell Hammett? "A bad writer." He likes Sayers's Gaudy Night and The Nine Tailors (the latter is called "a sunny, happy work of immense charm"). He is preoccupied throughout with the question of crime and metaphysics, an argument that I found difficult to follow, and likening the writer to an artist or musician. There is a good chapter on Conan Doyle ("Why worry if Doctor Grimesby Roylott—marvellous name—has brought his snake all the way here [and kept it in a safe, poor thing] expressly to bite young girls with financial expectations?"). The estimation of Margery Allingham's The Tiger in the Smoke as "deplorable trash" was the final straw.

I shall have to stick with the grace and thoughtfulness of Michael Gilbert and Vincent Starrett, methinks.

The brave new world of new media.

I thought I'd give new media a whirl, so some of my historical mystery short stories are now available in Sony ebook format:

• Two with Alice Roosevelt Longworth and FDR ("Come Flit by Me," set in TR's White House, and "Alice and the Agent of the Hun," where Alice hunts for a WWI German spy at a home of future Hope Diamond owner Evalyn Walsh McLean)

• Two with Bunbury, my sleuth in a Bath chair ("A Roman of No Importance" and "Lady Windermere's Flan"; to complete the Wildean motif, Mr. Wilde makes an appearance in "No Importance")

• "Keeper of the Flame," which won first prize in the Cape Fear (NC) Crime Festival Short Story Contest and is set in a remote Maine lighthouse

• "Unsinkable," which takes place on the Titanic

More info about the short stories' original print publication here.

I've had a great deal of fun casting Alice Roosevelt (1884–1980) as detective. She was brilliant (her light reading was Greek philosophers), rebellious, politically shrewd, and extremely well connected; she also could handle a gun (thanks to her energetic father). She liked the racetrack and a good game of poker, and her book Crowded Hours (1933, ed. Max Perkins) is interesting reading. I've often wished that she had run for office like her friend Ruth Hanna McCormick, but there were aspects of politics that she found unappealing. She was usually maligned for her cruel imitation of her cousin Eleanor and her less-than-helpful public comments during FDR's administration, but this could be viewed as retaliation for FDR and ER's actions during her half-brother Ted's New York gubernatorial campaign in the 1920s.

About the photo: Alice Roosevelt, ca. 1902. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, reproduction no. LC-USZC2-6251

A mystery by Oscar Wilde this week on BBC Radio 7.

Oscar Wilde's "Lord Arthur Savile's Crime," in which Lord Arthur is told that he is destined to be a murderer and thus decides he better get that out of the way, is featured this week on BBC Radio 7. Go here for the schedule or to listen.

New from Crippen and Landru.

Featured on the snazzily redesigned Web site of mystery short story publisher Crippen & Landru:

Two works by locked-room master John Dickson Carr: 13 to the Gallows and Speak of the Devil

The Battles of Jericho by the talented and sorely missed Hugh Pentecost, featuring his formidable artist-sleuth John Jericho (I loved Pentecost's hotel series with the urbane Pierre Chambrun and the Archie Goodwin-like Mark Haskell)

• Murder on the Short List by Peter Lovesey, including stories with my favorite hapless sleuth—Bertie, Prince of Wales.

And teasers for C&L goodies yet to come: works by British novelist Phyllis Bentley (best known for Inheritance, 1932), Norbert Davis, Loren Estleman, E. X. Ferrars, Erle Stanley Gardner, and S. J. Rozan, among others.

They live by night: Noir City DC festival.

Sponsored by the Film Noir Foundation at the AFI Silver Theater in Silver Spring, Maryland, is the Noir City DC series, which runs today through November 5 and features some of the best noir films ever made, such as Detour (1945), Double Indemnity (1944), Kiss of Death (1947), They Live by Night (1948), and Night and the City (1950). Actor Farley Granger will make a special appearance on October 25th. Go here for author Stephen Hunter's take on the festival.

More Rex Stout returns to print.

Nero Wolfe fans, rejoice: Bantam has followed up its edition of Rex Stout's Fer-de-Lance with a new edition of Some Buried Caesar (1939) and The Golden Spiders (1953).

New edition of Mertz's Red Land, Black Land.

For those who want more historical background on Elizabeth Peters's mysteries in an accessible format, there's a new edition of Red Land, Black Land: Daily Life in Ancient Egypt out from Morrow. Published under the name of Barbara Mertz (Peters's real name), the book illuminates the quotidian details of a fascinating civilization.

Morrow also has issued a revised and expanded edition of Mertz's Temples, Tombs, and Hieroglyphs: A Popular History of Ancient Egypt.

A whale of a tale.

The Massachusetts House of Representatives has passed a bill proposing that Herman Melville's Moby-Dick be named the state's official "epic novel." This is actually a change, as the original proposal called for it to be named the commonwealth's "official book," but the representatives from Salem and Concord objected. Salem is the birthplace of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Concord is the hometown of Louisa May Alcott. For the bill to become a law, it needs to pass the state senate and be signed by the governor.

(Hat tip to PhiloBiblos.)

Conan Doyle exhibition en route to Japan.

"The Case of the Portsmouth Doctor," an exhibition featuring the collection of noted Sherlockian Richard Lancelyn Green, will be displayed in Maizuru, Japan, from October 18 to November 30. The poster for the exhibition is at left.

The collection is housed at the Portsmouth City Museum in the United Kingdom. To see actor Stephen Fry in a video about the collection, go here. To see highlights from the collection, go here.

Nicolas Freeling this week on BBC Radio 7.

Nicolas Freeling's Dutch detective Piet van der Valk investigates in Love in Amsterdam this week on BBC Radio 7. Go here for the schedule or to listen.