The Crime Writer’s Association has announced (via their website) the shortlist for this year’s Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award. The winner will receive £2000 and also a steel dagger, which is based on the weapon used by Special Forces during World War II.

• Michael Connelly: The Brass Verdict (Orion)
• Gillian Flynn: Dark Places (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
• John Hart: The Last Child (John Murray)
• Charlie Newton: Calumet City (Bantam Press)
• Daniel Silva: Moscow Rules (Michael Joseph)
• Olen Steinhauer: The Tourist (HarperCollins)
• Andrew Williams: The Interrogator (John Murray)

The judging panel this year consists of: Corinne B Turner (Chair and Managing Director of Ian Fleming Publications), Sarah Fairbairn (Editorial Manager at Ian Fleming Publications), Philip Gooden, Samantha Weinberg (author of The Moneypenny Diaries), Rob Williams, and David Wilson (Head of Creative and Business Affairs at Eon Workshop; Michael G. Wilson’s son)

The winner will be announced on October 21st.

Sebastian Faulks’ hotly anticipated novel A Week in December was published in the UK on September 3rd. I forgot about it to be quite honest, though I shouldn’t have because for the last week or two Faulks has constantly been in the news for stirring up controversy due to comments he made about the Koran.

Anyway fans of Faulks in the US will be able to pick up the novel on October 27th. I look forward to reading it. I’ve read several of his books now and I’ve got nothing but praise for his works thus far.

Amazon.co.uk
Pre-order from Amazon.com

Young Bond author Charlie Higson’s original novel The Enemy has been published in the UK today.

Don’t know anything about it? Then check out the trailer, the official website, and/or how about a real short plot synopsis:

When the sickness came, every parent, police officer every adult fell ill. The lucky ones died. The others are crazed, confused and lying in wait. Only children under fourteen remain, and they’re fighting to survive. Because the adults who are alive are hungry…

Now that you know, order it on Amazon.co.uk. I suspect a US release is forthcoming, but probably not till next year. We’ll see.

Higson / Young Bond fans have The Young Bond Dossier to look forward to as well for next month on the 29th in the UK. The added short story alone should make that a worthy purchase. Can’t wait for that too.

I have a pretty long list of books to read and one that I’ve had near the top for awhile is A Hard Day’s Death by Raymond Benson. It’s got a pretty good premise about a private investigator who specifically takes on cases in the world of rock n’ roll. It’s actually a pretty brilliant idea, it just requires an author who’s got a love and knowledge of the business. Benson surely is that. His love of music, specifically (roughly) late 60’s and 70s rock (i.e., classic rock), clearly shows on just about every page. The table of contents reads like an album’s track list and each chapter is titled after a song (e.g., A Hard Day’s Night – performed by The Beatles). Throw in a guy best known for thriller books like James Bond, Splinter Cell, and Metal Gear Solid, and you got the ingredients for an entertaining hit.
(Read more…)

Cover art for Raymond Benson’s upcoming book Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty has been unveiled. The novelization is based on Hideo Kojima’s highly acclaimed video game of the same name that was released in 2001 for the PlayStation 2. It was later released as Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance for the Xbox in 2003.

Nothing too special about this cover art though since it’s almost identical to the box cover of the game, but now you’ve seen it. The book will be released on November 24th. Pre-order on Amazon. The first novelization, also by Benson, was released in May 2008 (Amazon).

About the book:

In a torrential downpour, former FOXHOUND agent Solid Snake stands on the George Washington Bridge–ready to launch himself onto the deck of the U.S.S. Discovery as it passes below. Inside Discovery is a new generation of Metal Gear. But in the next hour, Snake’s world explodes.

Two years later, a young, unproven agent code-named Raiden must penetrate the mystery of what went so insanely wrong that night.

In a labyrinthine superstructure in New York Harbor known as the Big Shell, enemies, allies, secret agents, and double-dealers converge: Russian commandos, a cyber Vamp, a long-legged, leather-clad, rifle-bearing beauty named Fortune, a deformed, finely manicured bomber called Fatman, and a mysterious Mister X. Somewhere in the maze, as well, is the president himself–his biometrics coded to a bomb that can take out Manhattan, his loyalties unknown. Now the rookie Raiden is fighting his way to one discovery after another, including the rebirth of Solid Snake himself and a nightmare organization with a history, a plan, and a terrifying superweapon hidden in plain sight.

The cover art for the 2nd edition of John Cork’s James Bond Encyclopedia has been revealed on Amazon. The book is currently available for pre-order and will be published on October 19. The new edition has been updated to cover Bond’s 22nd cinematic adventure, Quantum of Solace.

Amazon.com

Cover art for Raymond Benson’s second James Bond anthology, titled Choice of Weapons has been released. It’s pretty much in line with the first anthology The Union Trilogy that was released last year. Choice of Weapons will include Zero Minus Ten (1997), The Facts of Death (1998) and The Man with the Red Tattoo (2002) as well as the short stories “Live at Five” and “Midsummer Night’s Doom”.

Choice of Weapons will be published sometime in the spring of 2010, though last we heard it could be in June.

To promote his latest novel, The Enemy, author Charlie Higson stars in a trailer where he introduces the plot of the novel, but essentially dies or ‘evolves’ from the infection he speaks of. The trailer can currently be viewed only at the Times Online to my knowledge. (Update: On the official website now too)

“Having spent five years writing straight thrillers for kids I was tempted to try another genre. I wanted to see if I could write something frightening. I thought I owed it to the children of Britain to scare the living daylights out of them. We all need to be scared. It’s good for the soul. And kids need to be scared as much as adults. We all grew up with fairy tales. I don’t remember any fairies in them, but I do remember child-eating ogres, child-eating witches, child-eating stepmothers, and plucky little guys getting their revenge, be they Hansel and Gretel or Jack The Giant Killer.”

Looks cool to me. I’m throwing it down on my ridiculously long “books to read” list.

I’ve actually been out of town for the past week so I wasn’t able to get around to posting about the cover art for the 2009 Thrilling Cities and The Diamond Smugglers reprints.

The really good news is that these covers are pretty great in my opinion. The sorta-good news is that both reprints are available today, and the bad news (which is actually why the prior one was only “sorta-good”) is that they’re only available through Ian Fleming Publication’s shop which since the 25th has been down. Whoops.

Eventually: Ian Fleming Publications

Penguin Books in Australia has published Ian Fleming’s first James Bond novel, Casino Royale as part of their “Popular Penguin” line.

It joins other great classics such as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (Ken Kesey), The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald), Clockwork Orange (Anthony Burgess), Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Truman Capote), Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen), Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte), Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck), The Big Sleep (Raymond Chandler), Frankenstein (Mary Shelley), and many many others.

The book is available for $9.95 according to Penguin’s website.