P D James

As we travel dazed, anxious and weary-eyed in our air-bagged, steel-reinforced luxury cars down the blurry Information Superhighway, authors continue to do their less than fashionable job of measuring what will be lost in the new age of the megabyte and sound bite. Writers remain, thank old outdated God, exasperatingly human. They are going to have their own idiosyncratic emotions about the new age, and they are going to be stubborn and old-fashioned enough to actually write (the fools!

The screenwriters of "Children of Men" and the author of the source novel about a grim, childless near-future in which global infertility has doomed humans to extinction, have won USC Libraries Scripter Award. Screenwriters Alfonso Cuaron (who also directed the movie), Timothy J. Sexton, David Arata, Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby adapted the screenplay based on British writer P.D. James' novel.

Martin Shaw is the star of "George Gently," an excellent BBC detective series set in the 1960s in northeast England. Airing in Britain since 2007, it has shown locally this year on KCET, and its fourth season, comprising two feature-length episodes and joining three series already in release, has just been issued on DVD and Blu-ray by Acorn Media. A fifth has already been filmed. Based on but not particularly beholden to a series of crime novels by Alan Hunter and scripted by Peter Flannery (the movie "Funny Bones," the highly regarded and popular serial "Our Friends in the North")

Far more reserved a detective than Lord Peter Wimsey, Adam Dalgliesh will surely be slower to take his place alongside Dorothy Sayers' amateur sleuth in the hearts of PBS viewers. Where Wimsey was witty, P.D. James' Dalgliesh (Roy Marsden) is the stolid sort. Where Wimsey had an off-to-the-races bravado, Dalgliesh approaches his cases with the apparent enthusiasm of a bloodhound who'd rather dream about the quarry than pursue it.

How does an author of seriously literary fiction discover one of his books was owned by Bernie Madoff, the investor who defrauded his clients of billions of dollars? He sees it listed in an auction on EBay. That's how Rick Moody came to know that Madoff's library included his novel "Purple America . " Parts of the Madoff library collection is appearing piecemeal on eBay from a seller who won the books (Lots 750, 751 and 752) in a U.S. Marshall's auction of some of Madoff's Florida possessions.

"Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd?" the literary critic Edmund Wilson asked in a famous petulant essay, alluding to Agatha Christie's most controversial mystery and assaulting them all. Three leading contemporary mystery writers--P.D. James ("Devices and Desires"), Mary Higgins Clark ("Where Are the Children?") and Donald E. Westlake ("Trust Me On This")--provide some answers on who cares, and why, on Sunday morning's edition of "Bookmark" with host Lewis Lapham (10:30 a.m., Channel 28).

Having for years, out of delightful necessity, twice read every review published in Book Review, I "view with alarm" what is suggested by the last paragraph of T. Bruce Graham's letter (Aug. 28). I would not care to have Book Review institute a quota system based on whether an author or reviewer is straight or gay, "butch" or "femme," and on an at best educated guess as to how many Review readers are of this or that inclination. I have no objection to reading any number of reviews of books by, say, Tom Clancy, Rudyard Kipling, P.D. James or even Robert James Waller.

Fiction 1. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson ($14.95) 2. The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery ($15) 3. Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout ($14) 4. Say You're One of Them by Uwem Akpan ($14.99) 5. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows ($14) 6. Push by Sapphire ($13) 7. The Private Patient by P. D. James ($15)