49-Week Vacation: “The Killing Man,” Mickey Spillane’s...

49-Week Vacation: “The Killing Man,” Mickey Spillane’s first Mike Hammer detective novel in 19 years, is hitting bookstores. Spillane knows exactly what he’s going to say when he sits down to write his best-selling crime novels, and in three weeks, the job is done and he takes the rest of the year off. And Spillane, 72, is not hesitant in telling critics where to go. “If you’re satisfying a market, that’s the barometer of good writing, if you are making money at it,” he said Sunday night in Savannah, Ga.

Legal Wrangles: Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia will preside at the opening session of what is being called the “Woodstock of Lawyering.” Powerful, self-confident trial lawyers will gather for a display of courtroom skills Nov. 9 and 10 at the Moot Courtroom at the Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C. Combatants will include Brendan (Potted Plant) Sullivan, lawyer to convicted Iran-Contra figure Oliver North; Howard L. Weitzman, who persuaded a jury to acquit car maker John DeLorean, and Richard (Racehorse) Haynes, the colorful Texas criminal lawyer.

Prize: Poet James Merrill was named Sunday the first winner of a national prize for poetry awarded by the Library of Congress. The Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, which includes a cash award of $10,000, is in recognition of the most distinguished book of poetry written by an American and published during the past two years. Merrill’s winning book is “The Inner Room,” published in 1988.

Kerrey Missing: Sen. Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.), missed out on a chance for some good exposure in his home state. Kerrey was the subject of a profile in last week’s issue of Time magazine but, because of an error at a printing plant in Wisconsin, the pages about Kerrey were missing from the magazines that were distributed in Nebraska.