Writers and actors hungry to learn how to build unique characters (and keep them interesting) need to look no further than the 416 pages lying beneath the long-winded title of The Lineup: The World’s Greatest Crime Writers Tell the Inside Story of Their Greatest Detectives. Dangerous Women. Otto Penzler, owner of New York’s The Mysterious Bookshop and editor of lots of mystery genre anthologies, including Dangerous Women and The Encyclopedia of Mystery and Detection, compiled the book.

In the The Lineup, Penzler gathers together 20 different first class crime and mystery writers to talk about the nuts and bolts of character development. The various authors discuss how they came to write their mystery novels and series; how their individual detective characters were initially conceived; the secret behind the origins of their character names, obsessions and personality quirks; and how their crime-solvers have changed as people over time.

Many of the writers Penzler has included have connections to TV and film. Some have either had their fiction adapted for the screen or they’ve written screenplays themselves. These would include Robert Crais (The Equalizer, Miami Vice), Robert B. Parker (Spenser For Hire, A Man Called Hawk, Jesse Stone), Michael Connelly (Blood Work), David Morrell (First Blood, Brotherhood of the Rose) and others, like Stephen Hunter, Colin Dexter, Ian Rankin, Ken Bruen, Fay Kellerman, , John Lescroart, Jonathan Kellerman and Laura Lippman.

For content creators in any medium looking to develop the next McCloud or Magnum or Mackey, The Lineup: The World’s Greatest Crime Writers Tell the Inside Story of Their Greatest Detectives is valuable resource.

One of the country’s most influential comedic institutions turn 50 just a couple of weeks ago and I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention it.

The Second City Theatre opened in Chicago’s Old Town on December 16, 1959, on a mission to bring smart improvisational comedy to the masses, with a cast that included Barbara Harris (Family Plot, Nashville), Roger Bowen (Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H), Severn Darden (Conquest of and Battle for the Planet of the Apes) and Mina Kolb (Curb Your Enthusiasm). It also included Andrew Duncan (Network, Slapshot), who bears the distinction of being the only first generation Second City actor to appear on the first season of Saturday Night Live, along with other, later Second City alums John Belushi, Dan Ackroyd and Gilda Radner.

Since then, The Second City has functioned as kind of unofficial talent farm system for SNL, discovering, training and featuring generations of performers that have included Bill Murray, Brian Doyle-Murray, Jim Belushi, Tim Kazurinsky, Mike Myers, Chris Farley, Tina Fey, Rachel Dratch, Horatio Sands, and others.

Over the years, Second City has creatively fueled not only Saturday Night Live, but other entertainment franchises as well. From SCTV to Not Necessarily The News To Late Night/Late Show with Dave Letterman to The Colbert Report, to sitcoms (Cheers, The Simpsons) to Movies (Ghostbusters, Anchorman, I Want Someone To Eat Cheese With), Chicago’s favorite house of improv has given us actors, writers, directors and comics like Joan Rivers, Mike Nichols, Elaine May, David Steinberg, Del Close, Fred Willard, Peter Boyle, Joe Flaherty, Robert Klein, John Candy, Eugene Levy, George Wendt, Shelley Long, Richard Kind, Dan Castellanta, Bonnie Hunt, Nia Vardalos, Adam McKay, Jeff Garlin and many, many more.

The origins and first 20 years of the Second City were chronicled in Jeffrey Sweet’s oral history, Something Wonderful Right Away, published in 1978. It’s a terrific book that delves deep into the theory and art of Second City’s brand improvisational theater. It is still in print and well worth reading, especially for budding actors, writers and directors.

But contemporary audiences might find Mike Thomas’ new oral history, The Second City Unscripted, of slightly more interest. Whereas Something Wonderful covers the mid-fifties to the late seventies in its 375 pages, Unscripted dispatches that same period in about 60 pages, before moving on to surveying the next three decades in nine lively chapters with contributions from everyone from Dan Ackroyd and Martin Short to Bonnie Hunt and Mike Myers to Steve Carell and Stephen Colbert. Unscripted is a bit more the gossipy backstage tell-all than Something Wonderful, but it’s still compelling.

I’ve been a fan and supporter of the Second City for many years and, in fact, was lucky enough to spend a month or so inside the belly of the beast, making a documentary about Second City’s process. (During that production, Chicago Main Stage cast member Isabella Hoffman (Dear John, Homicide: Life on the Street) worked my name into a sketch. I’ve loved her ever since). But you don’t need any kind of personal connection with the troupe to enjoy both Something Wonderful Right Away and The Second City Unscripted. Taken together, they read like a secret history of contemporary American comedy. They’rehighly recommended and both available from our good friends at Amazon.com.

Film editing is not as discussed as much as it should be. Go into the cinema section of any bookstore and you’ll find far more studies and biographies of directors, cinematographers and screenwriters than you will about motion pictures editors.

That’s a shame, because the ability to edit picture and sound, to manipulate time and change performances is what the art of the cinema really is all about. You can write a script, you can film performers acting out that script, but you don’t start constructing the movie until you start cutting. Or, to quote filmmaker Garry Marshall: “Editing is the only process. The shooting is the pleasant work. The editing makes the movie.”

That said, let’s hear it for Bobbie O’Steen, author of the new book The Invisible Cut: How Editor Make Movie Magic and Carol Littleton, editor of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, Wyatt Earp and The Manchurian Candidate, among over 30 other films. The pair will be appearing live Sunday, January 10 at The Billy Wilder Theater on Wilshire Boulevard in a program co-presented by The UCLA Film & Television Archive and American Cinema Editors.

O’Steen and Littlejohn will present a screening of Lawrence Kasdan’s 1981 modern noir classic, Body Heat (which Littlejohn edited) and discuss the craft and art of film editing.

Projected frame grabs from Body Heat will highlight the editorial choices made on that movie and Bobbie O’Steen will conduct an interview with Carol Littlejohn that will, we are promised, “cover such broad-ranging topics as gendered perspectives, and the role of editing at a time of evolving production and storytelling paradigms.”

Don’t let that scare you. It’s going to be fascinating.

The big show starts at 7:00pm, with tickets running a mere ten bucks a piece. For more information, click here.

In the meantime, some favorite books on film editing include: When the Shooting Stops…The Cutting Begins by Ralph Rosenblum (editor of Annie Hall and six Woody Allen films), In the Blink of an Eye by Walter Murch (Jarhead, The Wolfman) and The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film by Michael Ondaatje. All are available at Amazon.