The winner of this year's Crime Cologne Award for a German-language mystery is Die Spiele by Stephan Schmidt. The honor has been presented as part of the Crime Cologne conference since 2015 and is intended to honor a work from the previous year that is linguistically, thematically, and psychologically convincing - and at the same time offers exciting entertainment at an outstanding level. A four-member jury, consisting of Mike Altwicker, Judith Merchant, Birgitt Schippers, and Margarete von Schwarzkopf, selected the novels. The winner receives 3,000 euros (approximately $3,300 USD).
Elly Griffiths, who writes the Dr. Ruth Galloway Mysteries, the Brighton Mysteries, and the Justice Series, has won Author of the Year at the Booksellers Association Conference Awards. The awards honor key figures in the book industry and the work they do to support UK bookshops. The winners were selected by 489 booksellers from across the UK.
Mystery Writers of America's 2025 Barbara Neely Scholarship, an award named after the late trailblazing Black crime novelist chosen as a Grand Master by MWA in 2019, is now open for applications from authors who are Black, American citizens, and age 18 or older. Applicants must submit a brief biography, competed application form, a five-page sample of their writing in the crime genre, a 300-500-word statement, and a copy of their CV/resume highlighting their education/writing career. The deadline is November 8, 2024. Two scholarships of $2,000 will be awarded, one for an aspiring Black writer who has yet to publish in the crime or mystery field, and another for Black authors who have already published in crime or mystery.
NoirCon is moving from the East Coast to the West Coast this year, landing in Palm Springs from November 7-10. The event includes a variety of panels and speakers, classic film screenings with special guests, notable author events, in-person book signings, and more. The conference will also hand out the Jay and Deen Kogan Award for Excellence posthumously to Jim Nisbet, to be accepted by his widow, artist Carol Collier. The award reflects the preservation of literary excellence and achievement, and recipients have devoted a lifetime to cultivating a greater appreciation and pride in America's literary heritage by writing, and/or publishing the most authoritative editions of America's best and most significant writing within the genre of noir.
Banned Book Week (#BannedBooksWeek) is being commemorated this week by the American Library Association and a variety of organizations around the U.S. In a time of deep political divides, library staff across the country are facing an overwhelming number of book ban attempts. In 2023 alone, the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom tracked 1,247 efforts to censor books and other resources in libraries—an increase of 65% from the year before. In total, 4,240 unique book titles were targeted, many of them representing LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC voices and experiences. Even crime fiction books have been challenged through the years at some point, including Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet, Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell Tale Heart, and Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl.
Bedford Square Publishers announced that Maxim Jakubowski has joined as Editor-at-Large to acquire new titles both for the Bedford Square and the No Exit Press imprints. Jakubowski is a well-known novelist, critic, and reviewer, as well as editor of several award-winning anthologies and owner of London bookshop Murder One. Maxim spent several decades in publishing roles in France and at Virgin, Rainbird and Ebury Press, where he commissioned many important bestsellers and created several major crime imprints, including the now legendary Black Box Thrillers and Blue Murder. The first titles he will bring to the list will include the highly controversial French prize-winner Emma Becker’s La Maison; works by the king of the French locked-room mystery, Paul Halter, and the master of Western noir, Scott Phillips; and Keith Donohue’s The Motion of Puppets, which US critics have described as "Stephen King meets Toys."
The Strand Mystery Magazine published a rarely seen essay this week from the 1930s, written by crime author G.K. Chesterton. He remains best known for his Father Brown mysteries, but he was also founding president of the Detection Club, a gathering of novelists whose original members included Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and AA Milne among others. In the essay he wrote, "Detective fiction had grown a little dull," and proceeded to opine about new ways to tell crime stories.
Elizabeth Foxwell, editor of Clues: A Journal of Detection, announced a call for papers on the theme of "reappraising James Ellroy," in honor of the 30-year anniversary of James Ellroy’s American Tabloid in 2025. Guest Editors will be Nathan Ashman (University of East Anglia) and Steven Powell (University of Liverpool). The proposal deadline is March 1, 2025. For more information, follow this link.
Mystery Readers Journal editor, Janet Rudolph, is seeking articles, reviews, and author essays for the upcoming issue, "Mysteries Set in London." Author essays are first person, about yourself, your books, and the "London" connection. Reviews are for books both in and out of print that are set in London. Author essays and articles should be 500-1,000 words, and reviews 50-250 words. The deadline is November 1, 2024.
In April 2015, B.K. Stevens debuted the blog series "The First Two Pages," hosting craft essays by short story writers and novelists analyzing the openings of their own work. The series continued until just after her death in August 2017, at which point Art Taylor took over at the helm. This week, Art welcomed Avram Lavinsky for the first post in a series celebrating the latest music-themed anthology from editor Josh Pachter: Friend of the Devil: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of the Grateful Dead, coming out next week from Down and Out Books. In addition to Lavinsky, the anthology includes stories from Bruce Robert Coffin, James D.F. Hannah, Vinnie Hansen, James L’Etoile, G.M. Malliet, Twist Phelan, Faye Snowden, Joseph S. Walker, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine editor Linda Landrigan (with her first published story), and more.
In the Q&A roundup, James R. Benn, author of the Billy Boyle World War II series, historical mysteries set within the Allied High Command during the Second World War, applied the Page 69 Test to The Phantom Patrol, the nineteenth installment of the series; and Vicki Delany, author of over 40 novels in various crime genres, also took up the Page 69 challenge to the newest novel in her Year-Round Christmas mystery series, A Slay Ride Together With You.
