Wednesday 28 March 2007

Take a few days off and you get left behind in this blogosphere. Monday night I attended Headline's Crime Evening, and what a superb event it was. I'm just waiting for Snapper Karim to send in the photos and the report will be up at SHOTS. But enough of that ... on with some news:

Garry Disher has always been the quiet achiever of Australian crime fiction but Chain of Evidence deserves a fanfare. He wrote six crime novels featuring the career criminal Wyatt, starting with Kick Back in 1991 (a series inspired by the hard-boiled Parker novels of American Donald Westlake), then some eight years later created a new series character, Detective Inspector Hall Challis, who first appeared in The Dragon Man. Chain of Evidence, the fourth book in this series inspired by the regional police procedurals of British writer John Harvey, is by far the most successfully achieved.
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The British Academy Television Craft Awards Nominations Announced From Life On Mars To Take That

The British Academy of Film and Television Arts has today announced the nominations for the forthcoming British Academy Television Craft Awards. The stars will turn out to celebrate the heart of the television industry on Sunday 22 April at The Dorchester in London, when they will honour the unsung heroes of television. The evening will be hosted by Jon Snow.

With 5 nominations each, 70s cop series Life On Mars and feature-length Myra Hindley drama Longford, lead the way in a hugely competitive fight for the coveted BAFTA masks.Unique to the British Academy Television Craft Awards is the diversity of programming in its categories, which this year sees programmes Jane Eyre and An Audience With Take That….Live! going head to head for Production Design.

With 3 nominations each are some of the major television highlights of the past year: Helen Mirren’s Prime Suspect : The Final Act, the costume drama Jane Eyre, the revealing Breaking Up With The Joneses, the fictionalised drama Tsunami: The Aftermath and natural history series Planet Earth.

Peter Morgan, who won 2 BAFTAs earlier this year for his film The Last King Of Scotland, will be hoping to make it a hat trick, having been nominated for his drama Longford in the Writer category. His worthy competitors for this award are Frank Deasy – Prime Suspect – The Final Act; Matthew Graham – Life On Mars and writing team Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant – Extras.

This year sees writers, directors and producers nominated for Break-through Talent. Neil Biswas writer/director of the feature length drama Bradford Riots, recreates the night of vicious riots in 2001, seen through the eyes of a group of young Asian men. Writer Sharon Foster in her feature length drama Shoot The Messenger, portrays a black teacher accused of racism for assaulting one of his black pupils. Producer/director Nick Holt in his documentary Guys and Dolls, shows the hidden world of grown men who embark on fully intimate relationships with life size, anatomically correct dolls. And last but not least maths teacher Brian Fillis is nominated for his first written work for television Fear Of Fanny, a drama about the first TV cook Fanny Craddock.

The British Academy Television Craft Awards for Interactive Innovation and New Media Developer underline their importance in complementing and expanding on the televisual experience. There is a wide spectrum of nominees in these categories, from CDX a broadband interactive game linked to the BBC history series Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall of an Empire to Breaking the News, a Channel 4 website for users to experience how broadcast news works.
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Memories Of Murder

Drama, based on a true story. The calm of a rural village is shattered by a series of murders The inept police seem to be getting nowhere with their investigations, will the arrival of a big city detective help catch the killer? In Korean with English subtitles. Strong language. [2003, Joon-Ho-Boon]

Detective Park Doo-Man ...... Kang-Ho Song
Detective Seo Tae-Yoon ...... Sang-Kyung Kim
Detective Cho Yong-koo ...... Roe-ha Kim
Sergeant Shin Dong-chul ...... Jae-ho Song
Sergeant Koo Hee-bong ...... Hie-bong Byeon

BBC4TV Sat 31 Mar, 22:35-00:45 130mins Stereo Widescreen
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Denise Hamilton is delighted to announce the publication of LOS ANGELES NOIR, an anthology from Akashic Books that I edited featuring 17 brand new stories by Michael Connelly, Janet Fitch, Susan Straight, Hector Tobar, Patt Morrison, Robert Ferrigno, Neal Pollack, Gary Phillips, Christopher Rice, Naomi Hirahara, Jim Pascoe, Scott Phillips, Diana Wagman, Lienna Silver, Brian Ascalon Roley, Emory Holmes II and Denise.

LOS ANGELES NOIR brings the ethos of Chandler and Cain filtered through a twenty-first-century, multicultural lens. This is a literary travelogue from the Chinese mansions of San Marino to the day spas of Koreatown to the windy hills of Mulholland Drive, the baby gangsters of East Hollywood, the OG entrepreneur of Leimert Park, the old money of Beverly Hills, and the working class of Mar Vista. Los Angeles Noir offers tales of crime and passion and betrayal from some of the most
innovative and celebrated writers working today.

Publishers Weekly said:

Connelly's "Mulholland Drive," a nice tribute to the classic noir film Double Indemnity, is representative of the quality writing that followers of previous volumes have come to expect. The movie industry, both latter-day and the present, offers a rich background for tight tales of trapped men and women whose passions or desperate circumstances lead them to violent ends, such as the book's stand-out,
Janet Fitch's "The Method." Another highpoint is the collection's concluding story, Diana Wagman's "What You See," a depressing but compelling tale of a tragic obsession.

For those in the US you are invited to join the authors for one of the following
readings/signings/cocktail parties/movie screenings. For more info,
please visit www.denisehamilton.com or
www.akashicbooks.com/losangelesnoir.htm

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San Mateo County Deputy District Attorney Al Giannini's imagination is in overdrive this week. But it's not to solve yet another murder case — the homicide prosecutor has handled 125 murder cases in a career spanning three decades, and has won every one of them. This week, he's huddling with longtime friend and best-selling crime writer John Lescroart to figure out how to nail the real killer in Lescroart's latest novel, which is set in San Francisco and Iraq. Read on for the full story.
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According to Charlie Stross, ebook sales figures are dismal. At best, they tend towards 20% of hardcover sales by volume — and that's for ebooks that are available in open formats that are not tied to a particular hardware platform, and that are not crippled by DRM (digital rights management) encryption schemes that prevent users from reading them on more than one machine. DRM-infested ebooks sell an order of magnitude fewer copies, in many cases not even covering the cost of taking the existing typeset masters and saving them in an ebook format.
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March is Women’s History Month. Nearly 600 state and local police officers in the Untied States have written books. And, twenty-one of those police officers are women. Like their male counterparts, they have written fiction, autobiographies, academic texts and even poetry. Interestingly enough, the most successful writer of romantic fiction is a retired male motorcop. Put the motorcop aside for the moment and let’s take a brief tour of the history of women police officers as writers.

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