Mystery Melange

Craig Sisterson's Kiwi Crime blog has information on how you can help the victims of the earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand, which shook the area yesterday. Buildings were toppled and at least 75 people have died, with many more people potentially trapped in rubble. As he also notes, crime writers Paul Cleave, Andrew Grant and Steve Malley came through unscathed, although no word yet on folks associated with the Christchurch Writer's Festival, the Ngaio Marsh Award, or the Ngaio Marsh House.

It's beginning to look like we need an Antiques Road Show for literary treasures. "Lost" stories by Mark Twain, P.G. Wodehouse and Graham Greene were published recently in The Strand, and last month, it was announced that fifteen new Dashiell Hammett stories had been found and will be published in an upcoming story collection (and one in The Strand). Now comes word that five new Daphne du Maurier stories were turned up by a bookseller in the author's home town and will likewise be included in a new collection. And just in time for Presidents' Day, 74 long-lost books from Thomas Jefferson's personal library were discovered buried in the stacks of Washington University's library.

Speaking of libraries, it turns out that librarians make decent sleuths. After some fancy detective work, several librarians helped track down a man who had been stealing library books for 11 years and is estimated to have sold 2,200 of them on eBay, making potential hundreds of thousands of dollars. Thanks to the efforts of Detective Librarian Loretta Kelleher and others, the thief is now behind bars in New Rochelle, NY.

It seems that crime fiction is still popular among libraries in the U.K., with a majority (somewhere around 60 to 70% of the top 100) of the most-borrowed titles in 2010 belonging to the mystery/suspense/thriller category. The most borrowed author was James Patterson.

The Crimefactory magazine blog has an archived interview from 1996 with author James Crumley (The Last Good Kiss), who died in 2008. In reply to why he and so many other writers seemed attracted to Missoula, Montana, Crumley noted "It was the middle of the bottom of an ice-age lake, so maybe it's the prehistoric mud that attracts us!," and as for his former state of Texas, "Where I lived is the last place where there's a great clash between the white minority and the Mexican American majority, where people are still race conscious in a really silly way."

A look at Crippen and Landau's upcoming releases includes three different collections of short stories by Edward D. Hoch, who also died in 2008. Hoch wrote some 950 stories in his lifetime, appearing in 34 years of consecutive Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine issues. The three collections include Nothing Is Impossible: The Third Casebook of Dr. Sam Hawthorne; Funeral in the Fog and Other Simon Ark Tales; and Hoch's Ladies, three series of short stories, each featuring a female protagonist.

The Toronto Star takes a look at the environs that inspired Dostoevsky's classic Crime and Punishment, "about a murderer, his crime and the eternal nature of consequence." Guided walking tours around the same streets of St. Petersburg's tough Haymarket area where the fictional Raskilnokov walked are quite popular these days, even as the 130th anniversary of Dostoevsky's death was honored February 9th.

Publishers Weekly has a wrap-up of the recent Love is Murder conference, and just a reminder that there's still time to register for Sleuthfest in Florida, coming up March 3-6, with special guest authors S.J. Rozan, Meg Gardiner and Dennis Lehane.