Linkage galore

So I read Janet Maslin’s review of newbie author Jeff Lindsay’s DARKLY DREAMING DEXTER and you know, I’m still not exactly certain if she liked the book or not. I’m leaning towards the negative end, but who knows? A small part of me is confused about the setup–a series character that’s a serial killer but, to misquote Ahnuld, “they were all bad!”–but I’ve heard a ton of buzz and will eventually get round to reading it.

Walter Wager, spy novelist and former honcho in the MWA, has died at the age of 79 as a result of complications from brain cancer.

Brooklyn DA Charles Hynes took the stand yesterday in the case set against him by former prosecutor Rob Reuland, saying that the author of HOLLOWPOINT and SEMIAUTOMATIC only wanted to work homicide cases to get material for his new novel. But in the end, did Reuland do the job he was hired for, and do it well? I wonder if that will be addressed in trial…

Lindsey Davis even after 16 Falco novels, still considers herself to be a “romantic writer” of a sort, as she tells a local paper in Birmingham. To hear her story of how she got published, it is quiet amazing that a publisher would bite at a hardboiled gumshoe working the Ancient Rome beat, but then again, the books are quite hilarious.

Lev Raphael reviews the new Sharan Newman novel for…The Forward? Why not? Especially since Newman’s book has a strong Jewish element, hence the appearance in the English-language version of the weekly Yiddish paper…

Mark Blayney’s story of how he went from self-published to literary sensation after unexpectedly winning the Somerset Maugham Award will be, no doubt, yet another that self-pubbed types will show proves that people pay attention to such things. The exception that proves the rule, and that’s all it will ever be. (link from TEV, I think. I saw it in a bunch of places.)

David Meaghan of the Boston Globe rounds up reactions from authors like Amy Bloom and Leonard Marcus to the NEA study that’s been widely disseminated round the ‘sphere.

It looks like 19th century poet Robert Southey, a contemporary (and brother-in law) of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, is about to get his reputation revived. The Independent reports back on a new five-volume opus of Southey’s poems that has just been released.

And finally, damn, I wish I had thought to do this, but Suzanne Strempek Shea beat me to the punch.