In Reference to Murder

New Crime Fiction Coming in March

New titles aplenty coming up in March from the likes of Sandra Balzo, Jo Bannister, Linwood Barclay, Cara Black, Rhys Bowen, Alan Bradley, Stephen J. Cannell, Laura Childs, Harlan Coben, Linda Fairstein, Joanne Fluke, Charlaine Harris, Roderic Jeffries, Jonathan Kellerman, Lisa Lutz, Gayle Lynds, Denise Mina, Walter Mosley, Lisa Scottoline, Randy Wayne White, and many more. 

Here are some lists of books to look for:

The Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore

Books N Bytes

San Diego's Mystery Books

Powells Books

The Bloodstained Bookshelf

Fantastic Fiction

Stop, You're Killing Me

Cozy Mysteries

Forgotten Books Friday: Voice Out of Darkness

Ursula Reilly Curtiss, born in 1923, came into the world with fairly impressive crime-fiction genes. Her mother, Helen Reilly, her sister, Mary McMullen, and her brother, James Kieran, all wrote mysteries. Curtis didn't start out that way, working first as a columnist for the Fairfield, Connecticut News in 1942, at age 19, followed by a stint as a fashion copy writer. She began writing mystery/suspense novels, full-time at that, when she married John Curtiss in 1947 (the marriage no doubt helping her financial circumstances enough to give her that opportunity). Her first book, Voice Out of Darkness, won the Red Badge Award for the best new mystery of 1948.

Rather than penning police procedurals like her mother, Curtiss focused on the type of story where an innocent bystander gets pulled reluctantly into becoming an amateur sleuth — against a backdrop of seeming domestic calm, with layers of evil hiding behind family secrets and familiar faces. Her protagonists were usually female, except for works like 1951's The Noonday Devil where the main character is a man who learns his brother's death as a Japanese POW was carefully planned by a fellow prisoner.

Voice Out of Darkness falls into the female-protagonist camp, where we find that thirteen years prior to the events of the book, Katy Meredith lost her foster-sister, Monica, in a skating accident. Although Katy tried to save Monica, Monica's last words were "Katy pushed me." Katy thought she'd escaped both her home town and the horrors of Monica's death by moving to New York, until she starts receiving threatening notes in the mail. At first she wonders if someone else near the ice that day overheard Monica's words and is trying to blackmail her, but when Katy returns to her childhood home, she finds evidence of a calculating killer whose sights are now set on her.

Curtiss has moments of crisp observations in her writing, such as the following character study:

She was disconcerted, in the midst of her apologies for lateness, by Lieutenant Hooper's mild and wren-like appearance; he looked, she thought, like a portrait of a suburban traveller. Rubbers. Plaid woollen muffler, an air of having been assembled, eyed critically, and finally dismissed on the 8:32 by a bustling, dutiful wife. Except for his eyes: shrewd, steady, impartial as jewellers' scales.

or this excerpt about Fenwick, Connecticut, Katy's home town:

[It] had its replicas all over the New England coast. It lay sheltered in a tumble of windy hills, its architecture a blend of pure old Colonial and the raw new bones of housing developments. Its chief prosperity came from the summer visitors who came to splash and play in its wide blue crescent of Sound and laugh delightedly at its ancient moviehouse. Its chief crop was gossip, sown and grown with zest...

Curtiss' strengths are in her characterizations, setting and pacing, the novel being a quick read, which helps make the slight thinness and predictability of the plot (at least by 21st-century eyes looking backward), not much of a distraction. Curtiss later had two of her books, made into movies, I Saw What You Did from 1965 (based on Curtiss' novel Out of the Dark (not to be confused with the similarly-named today's Forgotten Book offering), starring Joan Crawford, and 1969's What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice?, based on the author's novel The Forbidden Garden, featuring Geraldine Page and Ruth Gordon. Curtiss also wrote the screenplays for a couple of television episodes of Detective and Climax Mystery Theater.

Pulp Plus

Yesterday I mentioned the upcoming Pulp Fest, but many pulp fans may not be aware of the Pulp Fiction Collection at the Library of Congress. The collection has works dating from the 1920s to the 1950s, totaling approximately 14,000 issues from 310 titles such as Amazing Stories, Black Mask, and Weird Tales. Another good collection can be found in the George Kelly Paperback and Pulp Fiction Collection at the University of Buffalo. The Kelly collection includes 25,000 books and zines from the 1940s through the 1980s, with detective/mystery authors Richard Blaine, Carter Brown, James M. Cain, George C. Chesbro, John W. Corrington, Sean Flannery, Donald Hamilton, Marcia Muller, Gerald Petievich, Mike Warden, Erle Stanley Gardner, and Dashiell Hammett. For pulp hot off the press, check out links to contemporary publications on the Crime Zine Report.

Eventopia

PulpFest is welcoming award-winning author, editor, screenwriter, and biographer William F. Nolan as the Guest of Honor at this year’s convention, to be held July 30 to August 1 in Columbus, Ohio. Nolan is a leading authority on Max Brand and Dashiell Hammett as well as the other contributors to the Black Mask pulp magazine, appropriate since this year is the 90th anniversary of both Black Mask’s first issue and Max Brand’s first appearance in Western Story Magazine.

Margery Flax sent along reminders about the 2010 Edgar Awards Symposium, scheduled for Wednesday, April 28 from 8:45 a.m. to 5 p.m. and the Edgar Awards Banquet, the next day, Thursday, April 29th at 6:30p.m. The Symposium has a great lineup this year, from the talk by Donald Maas on "Writing the Breakout Mystery," to panels on "Dialogue: Telling vs. Showing" moderated by Reed Farrel Coleman; "Short Stories vs. Novels" with S.J. Rozan moderating; "Fact vs. Fiction – Falling in Love With Your Research," moderated by Hank Phillippi Ryan; "Writing Juvenile & Young Adult Mysteries" officiated by Chris Gabenstein; and a Q&A with Lee Child & Laura Lippman who will be interviewed by Oline Cogdill.

Fresh on the heels of Poisoned Pen's first-ever online mystery conference, they'll also be offering a 3-day conference in Scottsdale with Rebecca Cantrell, PF Chisholm, Diana Gabaldon, Sophie Hannah, Vicki Hendricks, Michael Koryta, Sophie Littlefield, Gary Phillips, Dana Stabenow, Lauren Willig and other authors to be announced. The conference is so brand-new, it doesn't have a name yet—but if you submit the best suggestion, you could win a prize. Kicking off the event is a discussion led by Patrick Millkin, editor of Phoenix Noir, and along with readings and signings, there may be a Georgette Heyer Afternoon on Friday. The grand finale at the Biltmore Hotel includes a pajama party with late-night readings and "the hotel Bar is braced for people in PJs to buy booze to take to the ballroom."

Write On

If you're a short-story writer looking for anthologies where you can submit your work, I've listed a few below (note:  a couple have deadlines coming up soon). Not all are specifically related to crime fiction, but many have cross-genre possibilities, most are paying markets, and there are no entry fees.

• A Whodunit Halloween. As the title indicates, this anthology centers on Halloween mysteries. The deadline for submissions is April 15 for stories up to 15,000 words. This is a project of Pill Hill Press, which has various and sundry other open anthologies on their web site.

• The Way of the Wizard. Think Harry Potter―wizards, witches, sorcerers, sorceresses, any user of magic. The limit is 5,000 words, and the deadline is March 31. For more details, check out the editor's web site.

• You Don't Have a Clue: Mystery for Teens. This is a narrow market, for Latino and Latina authors to submit mystery stories suitable for the teenager set. Stories can be up to 6,000 words, with a submission deadline of March 31st. For more details, click here.

• The Book of Villains. This is one of a series of themed anthologies published by the Main Street Rag Short Fiction Anthology. They want "your evil, your plotting, your cruel. Give us your vengeful, your jealous, your cold. Give us your villains! Not anti-heroes or flawed characters or the morally questionable―leave no question about it: we want to populate a book with the truly malicious." Provided, you can do it in 10,000 words of less. The reading period begins May 1.

For more anthology and short-story markets, check out Sandra Seamans' wonderfully informative blog, My Little Corner.

Media Murder for Monday

MOVIES

In the fall of 2009, Sony issued a five-disc set, Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics Volume I, and this month they'll release Bad Girls of Film Noir. The two volumes have eight films total from American film noir's heyday, and all are new to DVD.

The Swedish film based on Stieg Larssen's novel The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo won the Best Picture award at Sweden’s equivalent of the Oscars, and has already grossed over $100 million worldwide. It's finally being officially released in the U.S. on March 12. The Starcasm site has the movie poster and American video trailer.

Ethan Hawke and Kristin Scott Thomas will star in the cinema adaptation of The Woman in the Fifth, a thriller based on the 2007 novel by Douglas Kennedy. (Hat tip to Mystery Books News)

TV

The American TV series Castle is coming to the U.K., after UKTV acquired the rights to the ABC show starring Nathan Fillion.

Production beings this spring on the TV series based on the Aurelio Zen mysteries by Michael Dibdin. Rufus Sewell will star as the fictional Italian detective.

Southland star Ben McKenzie who plays rookie L.A.P.D. police officer Ben Sherman talks with the Wall Street Journal about the show, its cancellation by NBC and subsequent resurrection by TNT, and how he's becoming a private detective in his spare time to stay sharp.

Australian actor Sullivan Stapleton (Underbelly) joins Donald Faison (Scrubs) as stars in The Odds, a pilot about a pair of Las Vegas cops who are as outrageous as the crimes they solve. CSI director-producer Ken Fink will also direct The Odds pilot.

Actor Natalie Martinez (Sons of Tucson) joins Aisha Hinds and John Michael Hill in the cast for the ABC drama pilot 187 Detroit, which centers on the city’s top homicide division as seen through the cameras of a fictitious documentary crew.

Fox has canceled its freshmen series Past Life after seven episodes, although it may return in the summer. It's based on MJ Rose's novel The Reincarnationist.

WEB/RADIO

The Crime Prevention 101 radio show interviewed novelist and former prosecutor Alafair Burke, about how her prior legal experiences formed the basis for her characters and her new book 212 which focuses on cyberstalking and murder.

NPR's Morning Edition talked with Swedish novelist Henning Mankell about his latest book, Man From Beijing, which draws from Mankell's own experiences living abroad. You can listen to the archived podcast here.

Forgotten Books Friday

I'm still on the road this week, but do check out Patti Abbot's Forgotten Books Friday offerings today. For other neglected authors, visit the Mysterious Bookshop blog for featured authors of the week such as this posting about Christiana Brand or this one about neglected author Michael Avallone.

Mystery Melange

Busted Flush Press is reprinting Don Winslow's first five novels (the Neal Carey P.I. series) which have been out-of-print for over 15 years. Winslow is best known for his most recent success with The Dawn Patrol. Although the first Busted Flush installment doesn't come off the presses until Fall, the cover is already available.

Henning Mankell sat down for a Q&A with David Robinson of the Scotsman, discussing Mankell's early life in Stockholm and how his father (a judge in the district court who talked to his young son about some of his cases) may have been behind the sense of social justice which motivates Mankell's protagonist, Kurt Wallander.

Mysterious Matters wonders why most manuscripts today seem to have an antiseptic quality and suggests that the likely culprits are publishers afraid to take chances when so much money is at stake:  "I realize that the books that I love most are the ones that make me behave most irrationally. They make me think, 'Oh God, 50% of reviewers are going to hate this. But the other 50% will go gaga for it.' Or 'Holy mackerel, someone who was brave enough to do THAT? Wow.'"

Publisher and editor Raelene Gorlinsky has advice for authors ready to submit a manuscript to an agent or editor: “Proofread; make sure there are no typos, misspellings, grammar errors.” Sounds like common advice, but apparently many authors overlook it. On a somewhat related point, agent Noah Lukeman answers the question "Should I revise my work for a prospective agent?"

NPR is hosting its third 3-minute short fiction contest. This time, writers need to take inspiration from a photograph you can find on the contest web site. Entries have to be short enough to be read on the air in three minutes or less, about 500 words.

The Smithsonian magazine took a look at Abraham Lincoln, true crime writer: while practicing law in Springfield, Illinois, the future President defended a man in a highly unusual case which he later used as the basis for a mystery short story.

Valentine's Day may be over, but it's not too early to start thinking about next year. Beet cupcakes or red bell pepper cheesecake, anyone?

Two Wins for Literacy

If you're a published author, the upcoming Malice Domestic has a publicity opportunity that also helps raise money for a good cause.  Every year the mystery conference has both live and silent auctions of author goodies with proceeds benefiting literacy programs at the John L. Gildner Regional Facility for Children and Adolescents in Rockville, Maryland. If interested, you can donate books, the opportunity to name a character in a book, a critique of a few chapters of an aspiring author's manuscript, themed baskets, or whatever else strikes your fancy. For more information, contact [email protected] before March 15th. All items have to be shipped no later than April 10th.

The second annual "Scare The Dickens Out of Us" ghost story contest offers $1,000.00 first place, $500.00 second place and $250.00 third place prize money this year for a new, original ghost story (any genre) up to 5,000 words. The contest raises funds for the Friends of the Dr. Eugene Clark Library in Lockhart, Texas (the oldest library in Texas). For details and rules, check out this site. You've still got some time, though:  entries will be accepted July 1 to October 1. There's also a Junior "Scare the Dickens Out of Us" contest for kids aged 12 to 18 with a $250.00 first prize and a $5.00 entry fee.

Media Murder for Monday

MOVIES

Author Dennis Lehane (Mystic River, Shutter Island) is penning his first actual screenplay, one based on his short story "Animal Rescue" from the recent Boston Noir anthology.

Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci and DreamWorks Pictures have acquired the film rights to the Locke & Key series of suspense comics written by Joe Hill, who also happens to be the son of author Stephen King.

Sam Worthington is headlining the cast of the murder mystery movie Texas Killing Fields, based on a script by Donald F. Ferrarone, with Michael Mann (Public Enemies) producing. Worthington will play a local homicide detective who works with a New York transplant to wage a war against serial killers, based on a true story which involved two decades of homicides with as many as 60 victims.

Katherine Heigl (Grey's Anatomy) has been chosen to star in Janet Evanovich's novel One for the Money, portraying the author's popular bounty hunter Stephanie Plum from the mystery series. The script won't be written by Evanovich, however, but by Karen McCullah Lutz and Kirsten Smith. A glance around cyberspace finds that Heigl may not be a "plum" choice, according to many fans of the series.

It appears that an English-language remake of the Danish film Terribly Happy is in the works. The plot hinges on a down-on-his luck police officer who finds strange happenings in a remote Danish village where he's trying to start a new life.

TV

HBO has picked up a five-hour miniseries titled Mildred Pierce, based on James M. Cain's noir novel and adapted by Todd Haynes and Jon Raymond. Kate Winslet has been signed to star, with production beginning in April.

The cast for the remake of Hawaii 5-0 is shaping up. Alex O'Loughlin (Moonlight) will take on the role of Detective Steve McGarrett. O'Loughlin joins Lost star Daniel Dae Kim, who will play Detective Chin Ho Kelly.

Hart Hanson (creator of Bones) will serve as executive producer of the Fox remake of the British series Prime Suspect. The new project, titled Pleading Guilty, is a police procedural centering on rogue CIA operatives.

New Zealenders take note:  Alix Bosco's debut thriller novel Cut and Run is being turned into a two-part TV mini-series. It features a middle-aged legal researcher named Anna Markunas who discovers that the murder of a celebrated athlete isn't what it appears to be.

Writer Curt Evans analyzes a new British adaption of Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot novel Three Act Tragedy which may be making its way to U.S. airwaves soon. Evans points out that the novel was "originally published in significantly different version in the United States and Great Britain. The British film is on the whole loyal to the British version of the novel, though the murderer is made more sympathetic, reflecting the more ambiguous moral tone of modern crime novels and films."

Frank Grillo (Prison Break) has been signed as the lead in ABC's supernatural crime drama series The Gates. The plot concerns a big-city cop who becomes chief of police in a sleepy planned community and finds there's more to the residents than meets the eye.

WEB/RADIO

NPR's Morning Media Menu featured author David Peace (Red Riding Quartet) who talked about his admiration of James Ellroy and why Peace feels "I don't really see the point of making up crimes."