Here are the top selling crime fiction book titles for December from Independent Mystery Bookseller Association (IMBA) member store Mysterious Galaxy:

Hardcovers:

1. The Drop by Michael Connelly
2. The House Of Silk by Anthony Horowitz
3. ‘V’ Is For Vengeance by Sue Grafton
4. Murder Season by Robert Ellis
5. Family Legacy by Jack O’Halloran
6. Explosive Eighteen by Janet Evanovich
7. Red Mist by Patricia Cornwell
8. Death Comes To Pemberly by P.D. James
9. The Boy In The Suitcase by Lene Kaaberbøl & Agnete Friis
10. The Litigators by John Grisham

Paperbacks:

1. Trashy Chic by Cathy Lubenski
2. Dead Bolt by Juliet Blackwell
3. The Night And The Music by Lawrence Block
4. Double Booked For Death by Ali Brandon
5. Narrows Gate by Jim Fusilli
6. A Study In Sherlock ed. by King & Klinger
7. The Last Word by Ellery Adams
8. Resuscitation by D.M. Annechino
9. Though Not Dead by Dana Stabenow
10. In The Shadow Of Sherlock Holmes ed. by Klinger

Sad, but understandable, news today from the editor of Back Alley Webzine, Richard Helms. He sent this note out to the crime fiction community:

This decision has been a long time coming, but I've decided to shut down The Back Alley Webzine.

We've had a great almost-five-year run.

Well, four of the five years were great. 2011 didn't really exist.

After the deaths of my mother and stepfather, within five weeks of each other in 2010, I sort of lost motivation to do a lot of things, and The Back Alley was one of them. 2011 was an amazing year for me personally, with four major award nominations and one win, but all the hoopla distracted me from the editing and publishing duties that might have kept The Back Alley alive.

I was very proud of what we were able to accomplish in just four short years:

Five Derringer Award nominations. Two were for me, and one each went to John Weagly, Debbi Mack, and Chris F. Holm. Two of these nominations resulted in wins (Paper Walls/Glass Houses, written under my pseudonym Eric Shane; and In The Shadows of Wrigley Field, by John Weagly).

A Spinetingler Award nomination for Claude Lalumi??re (She Watches Him Swim)

An Anthony Award nomination for Simon Wood (The Frame Maker)

And, among my proudest achievements, The Back Alley Webzine became the very first all-electronic publication to be accepted by Mystery Writers of America as an Approved Publisher (Periodical/Webzine).

Along the way, we published stories by winners of the Edgar, Anthony, Agatha, Shamus, and Derringer Awards. Authors who graced our electronic pages included O'Neil De Noux, Ross Macdonald protege Fred Zackel, Wayne D. Dundee, Simon Wood, Stephen D. Rogers, Angela Zeman, Patricia Abbott, Jack Bludis, Tim Wohlforth, Keith Gilman, Jochem Vandersteen, Nick Andreychuk, Anita Page, Keith Gilman, John Lau, and G. Miki Hayden, among others.

While I was proud to showcase acclaimed authors, one of the greatest pleasures came from uncovering new and emerging talents. In each issue, I tried to feature at least one story by an author who either had never had a paid publishing credit, or was at the very beginning of what I hoped would be a jet-propelled ride up the writing ladder.

I plan to keep the website up for at least a few more months, and eventually I will migrate all the archived issues over to my personal website, so that they will continue to be accessible for readers looking for a toot of the good ol' hard stuff.

As a side note, I really would prefer to see the webzine keep going, even though I just don't have the time anymore to make that happen. If anyone out there would like to take up the reins and drive the second generation of The Back Alley Webzine, I will happily sell the domain name and rights to produce the 'zine. How about twenty bucks and bottle of Patron Anejo tequila?

Thanks to all the readers for a great run. Onward and upward!

Richard Helms
2011 ITW Thriller Award Winner

Delano Ames (1906-1987) was born in Ohio to a newspaperman father. In 1929 Ames married Maysie Grieg, who later became a highly successful author of lighthearted romances, and the duo settled in Greenwich Village where Ames published his first novel, a philosophical look at the Greek gods entitled A Double Bed on Olympus. When the couple divorced, Ames moved to England where he remarried and worked for British intelligence during the second World War.

After the war, according to his tongue-in-cheek autobiography, he "translated an erudite history of keyboard instruments from the French, and believes that at least 100 copies were sold." Fortunately, his later efforts were more successful, beginning with in 1948 with She Shall Have Murder, the first in what was to become a 12-book series featuring the British husband-and-wife sleuthing team of Jane and Dagobert Brown. Ames produced a Brown book every year until 1959 when he moved to Spain and switched to writing a four-book
series featuring Juan Llorca of the Spanish Civil Guard.

She Shall Have Murder, made into a movie on British television in 1950, introduces Jane Hamish, a pretty young executive in the law firm Daniel Playfair and Son, and Dagobert Brown, Jane's lover and a researcher/writer who is so absorbed in the thriller he and Jane are concocting around the law firm's staff, that he is astonished when the wrong victim dies. Said victim is Mrs. Robjohn, the least favorite client of the firm, thanks to her frequent calls, letters and visits and unwavering paranoid belief that the mysterious "they" are out to get her.

She Shall Have Murder was labeled as "Detection with Wit" when first published in 1948, an apt description of the characters of Jane, always the common-sense, down-to-earth narrator, and her other half Dagobert, whose eccentricities and passing fads often leave Jane alternatively delighted and driven to despair ("Dagobert is my hero, but he persistently refuses to behave like one.") One of Dagobert's primary pursuits is amateur sleuthing that he puts to good use as he resorts to bluffs, disguises, charm and insightful detection in his efforts to prove Mrs. Robjohn was murdered.

Jane makes a delightful narrator, as in this bit about her thoughts on her potential novel-writing career at the start of the story:

"On the other hand, thrillers have nowadays become an accepted art-forom; bishops and minor poets read practically nothing else, and the New Statesman reviews them....The beginning of a book is always the tricky part. It should arrest. A shot should ring out in the night, or if you prefer, a rod should cough or a Roscoe belch forth destruction. Personally, I like to meeet my corpse on page one, and I like him (or her) to be very dead."

In Peter Walker's foreword to the Black Dagger edition of She Shall Have Murder, he notes that the novel is a time capsule of post-World War II life, with utility clothing, conscription, rationing, listening to the wireless, putting lavender in the clothes closet, feeding gas meters with shillings and girls who resemble Rita Hayworth. But the writing sparkles over 60 years later and is far from dated in its ability to entertain.

I  hope you'll pardon the little advance spring-cleaning of the blog. I've been wanting to change the color scheme for some time to make it a little easier on the eyes, which I hope I've accomplished. At any rate, everything else is the same—the content, links, archived posts, features—the only changes are a little bit of a blog facelift.

Also I wanted to point out that I'll be adding a new regular feature on the blog this year, something I call "Author R&R," (Reference and Research) in which crime fiction authors stop by to talk about how they undertake researching their books or whether too much research can be death to a mystery novel. Already lined up are Betty Webb, Carola Dunn, Hilary Davidson, Susan Wittig Albert, Jane Cleland, Tina Whittle, Jake Needham, Carolyn G. Hart and William Ryan, with more to come.

Hope you'll continue to drop by and check out the latest news, books, authors, and features!

MOVIES

It's official: the sequel to the American film version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo starts filming later this year. and Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara are back on board. What's not official: will David Fincher return to direct?

Screenwriter Zach Helm has come onboard to adapt Deep Water, the 1957 suspense novel by Patricia Highsmith, for Fox Films. The book is about an upscale suburban husband allows his wife to have affairs...but then the paramours start disappearing. (Hat tip to Omnimystery News.)

It appears that the comedic Police Academy films featuring a bunch of trainee police misfits are going to get a reboot. A new script by David Diamond and David Weissman will be produced by Police Academy veteran Paul Maslansky, with filming expected to start later this year.

David Fincher gives inside info to the Hollywood Reporter on the making of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Among the tidbits: he did a lot of research at Weather.com.

TV

At the Golden Globes last night, crime drama Homeland was a big winner, taking home Best Drama and Best Actress awards (Claire Danes). Idris Elba won Best Performance by an Actor in a Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television for his work in Luther, the British psychological drama where he plays Detective Chief Inspector John Luther.

It took 150 years to happen, but a TV version of The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins is in the works for the BBC. Described by T.S. Eliot as the"first and greatest of English detective novels," the three-part series will follow the original story in which Sergeant Cuff of Scotland Yard us called in to solve the theft of a precious stone. The new drama is scheduled to air over Christmas 2012 but has yet to be cast.

Possibly spurred by the success of shows like the Sopranos and Boardwalk Empire, AMC is developing a TV series based on the film Goodfellas, penned by Goodfellas co-writer Nicholas Pileggi with Jorge Zamacona. The original 1990 film followed star Ray Liotta over a span of decades as he grew up to become a gangster and climbed the ranks of an organized crime unit.

After NBC acquired the US rights to the Israeli crime thriller Timrot Ashan (Pillars of Smoke), the television network has finally ordered a pilot for a potential series, to be titled Midnight Sun. The story, about a police investigation of a cult from the Golan Heights that has mysteriously disappeared, is being written by Lisa Zwerling (FlashForward, The Event).

TNT has given the go-ahead for a pilot based on John Buntin's book L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of  America's Most Seductive City. Frank Darabont (The Walking Dead) will write and direct the pilot about the battle for the soul of the city waged between the LAPD and the West Coast mob.

The producers of the popular TNT crime drama The Closer insist it won't be the same show as its Major Crimes spin-off series set to debut this summer, with most of the same cast. They say that Crimes will feature more of a "group view" and look at the justice system differently through the lens of  “How much justice can we afford?”

The USA Network renewed its longest running series, Psych, for a 7th season. The show stars James Roday stars as police consultant Shawn Spencer, who solves crimes with powers of observation so acute that Santa Barbara Police Department detectives think he's psychic. (Hat tip to Omnimystery News.)

Psycho: the prequel. That's the idea behind the pilot Bates Motel that A&E is developing, showing us how Norman Bates developed into the demented serial killer and some back story behind his mother, Norma. A&E is also adapting Those Who Kill, a Danish series based on the work of author Elsebeth Egholm.

The CW has ordered a pilot based on the classic comic book character of superhero crime fighter Green Arrow, set in a new world with an original story.

On a panel this past week, author Elmore Leonard admitted that he's always tried to make his stories as visual as possible so they’ll sell to Hollywood. "From the very beginning I’ve been in it to make money, and writing visually is the way you do it."

During that same TCA event where Elmore Leonard appeared, AMC confirmed the fifth season of Mad Men will debut on March 25, with its first two-hour premiere. The Killing‘s second season will start on April 1.

Casting (not) against type? Susan Lucci., long-time star of the soap opera All My Children will host and narrate the 10-part series Deadly Affairs on Investigation Discovery this fall. The show will include real-life stories of office romances, love triangles and adultery.

THEATER

If you're in the Houston area, check out a new production of the Edgar Award-nominated play Deadly Murder at the Theatre Suburbia through February 4th. The play "combines suspense, humor, attempts at drawing-room comedy, bizarre twists, violence and sturdy actors in an unlikely medley offering something for everyone."