News from around

Over at CrimeSpot, it's Black Mystery Month, where you'll get an education to black crime fiction and black detectives.

John Grisham, in an Associated Press interview, says he's not a literary author, that's he an entertainer. As someone who made $9 million last year, I'm sure he doesn't care what he's called; he's laughing all the way to the bank. He also talks about his addiction to political campaigns and his new book, The Appeal.

There's been a bit of uproar over quotes attributed to Whitbread award-winner Joan Brady. The whole story is over at P.J. Parrish's blog, which writes Brady sued a shoe factory in her English village claiming that toxic fumes had caused her health to deteriorate so much that she had been "reduced to writing thrillers." Or so that was the quote in the London Times. As it turns out, Brady said no such thing, Parrish writes. Says Brady: "I haven't dumbed down. I never said it. That's the pure invention of the Times. They have decided that this effete literary woman has become so stupid that she can no longer write boring literary fiction and writes poorly selling thrillers instead. My mental faculties haven't deteriorated. And anyway, what an insult it would be to thriller writers to suggest that you need to be stupid to write them. It seems to me so irritating that you would denigrate a remarkable genre where much of the best writing is done. I'm a great admirer of writers like John Grisham and Scott Turow." Anyhow, her new thriller is Bleedout, and it's one going on my TBR list.

And over at Euro Crime, we learn that
screening of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency movie, based on the novel by Alexander McCall Smith, has been set for March 24.