watching the headcrab detectives..

Firstly, the Marc Laidlaw interview I wrote for Gamasutra (the online arm of Game Developer magazine) is now available on their site. I'm actually fairly happy with it, since we tried out a article/interview hybrid, fleshing out the normal (tedious?) Q+A somewhat, and it seems to have turned out decent. I'll keep everyone posted as to who we're interrogating next, we have our next quaking interview subject firmly in our sights.

Oddly, on a completely different and fully un-segue-able front, here's some random crime novel/TV show recommendations:

- when i was in England, I had a chance to read PD James' 'Death In Holy Orders', a beautifully realised version of the classic detective novel. Amazingly, James was over 80 when she wrote this relatively recent piece of work, and it features her serial character, Adam Dalgleish, as he investigates suspicious circumstances in a decaying clerical college in East Anglia. It may seem rather Agatha Christie to the casual observer, but au contraire - it's earthier and more emotional by far, and wonderfully written, with a surprisingly hard-biting edge. Highly recommended.

- now I'm back in the States and catching up with the TiVo, I finally got a chance to see an episode of 'Monk', the intriguing crime show on USA Network starring the mercurial Tony Shalhoub, whose performance in Galaxy Quest I'm still chuckling over. And I really dig it, as do many critics, it seems. The one paragraph pitch: Shalhoub is an obsessive compulsive, borderline idiot savant San Francisco detective, who makes almost Holmes-ian deductions while supported/tolerated by his friends and fellow co-workers. Since I love classic mystery, and the show seems to be about clever motives, methods, and twists, well.. ker-ching?

- I'm currently reading another crime novel sourced from England, Ian Rankin's 'Resurrection Men', featuring his hard-boiled Edinburgh policeman Inspector Rebus. I believe Rankin's books have been filmed as a TV show in England, but the purity of the novel works just perfectly for me, and I may well have to track down more of Rankin's work - Rebus is Morse given a Glasgow kiss, believably maverick, and wonderfully world-weary. Again, perhaps it slots neatly between genre boundaries, but who cares when it's this well-written?