In Reference to Murder

Halloween Mystery Melange

Janet Rudolph's Mystery Fanfare blog has a nice long list of mystery novels (and a few short stories) with a Halloween theme.

Elizabeth Foxwell, editor of Clues: A Journal of Detection, notes that just in time for Halloween, Clues 30.2 has been published—a theme issue on paranormal mysteries guest edited by Agatha and Macavity nominee A. B. Emrys.

What better way to celebrate Halloween than snuggling down with a dim light (candlelight would be pretty awesome) and some Edgar Allan Poe stories? GalleyCat very helpfully posted links to free Poe eBooks from Project Gutenberg.

Are you stuck trying to think of a perfectly horrorific word to use? Dictionary.com compiled "Seven Spooky Words for Halloween."

Audible has released a new audio short story from author Neil Gaiman titled "Click-Clack the Rattlebag." Audible will donate $1 per download through Halloween to the literary charities DonorsChoose.org and Booktrust.

Here's a chance for you to win 10 horror movies on DVD. Simply snap photos of your TV or movie-inspired costumes, either from this year or excellent ones from years past, and e-mail them to [email protected] before midnight on Friday, November 2, to be entered in a drawing.

What can you do with a giant pumpkin? Ray Villafane of Villafane Studios took one 1,800-pound pumpkin and created a ghoulish (zombish?) masterpiece for the New York Botanical Garden's Haunted Pumpkin Garden. The Mirror newspaper online has several other amazing pumpkin masterpieces.

BookRiot compiled its own gallery of Bookish Pumpkins (part one and part two), from Winnie the Pooh to Harry Potter.

Lucy Burdette, one of the authors who make up the Mystery Lovers' Kitchen blog, has an easy-peazy recipe for a Pumpkin Cornmeal Halloween Cake (that can be gluten-free if you use GF flour). Bonus points to Lucy for wearing the Kermit costume...

Over at the Criminal Element, Deborah Lacy offers up drink recipes to go along with some favorite crime dramas on TV (The Castletini) and mystery authors and books (Poirot Pumpkin Coffee).

Don't forget man's best friend, with these 25 Crazy Pet Costumes for Halloween.

Here are 10 classic short Halloween cartoons you can watch online, from Disney’s 1929 Skeleton Dance to The Duxorcist starring Daffy Duck.

Bibliomysteries

I received an interesting e-mail from Nina Lassam at Open Road Media, which is a publishing partner with Mysterious Press for eBooks. Together, they're releasing new bibliomystery eBooks from best selling mystery authors Anne Perry, Ken Bruen, C.J. Box, and Jeffery Deaver on November 12th. What is a Bibliomystery, you may ask? It's a book featuring books, manuscripts, libraries or publishing houses as a major theme that can appear in all the various subgenres: hard-boiled private-eye stories (such as Raymond Chandler's classic The Big Sleep), cozy mysteries (including those of Charlotte MacLeod's librarian sleuth) and the mainstream detective novel (such as Booked to Die by John Dunning).

The upcoming titles include

• The Scroll by Anne Perry: An ancient book draws a bookseller into a chilling mystery.
• Pronghorns of the Third Reich by C.J. Box: A hidden library holds a mystery that stretches back to Nazi Germany.
• Book of Virtue by Ken Bruen: A son¹s only inheritance is a leather-bound book, which causes his life to spin out of control.
• An Acceptable Sacrifice by Jeffery Deaver: A cartel leader's weakness is antique books ­ which federal agents use to attack where it matters most.

Look for more bibliomystery eBook titles in the coming months.

Media Murder for Monday

MOVIES

The Bond film franchise movie #23, Skyfall, has yet to debut in theaters in the U.S. (it debuted to record box office overseas this weekend), but Bond #24 and #25 are reportedly already being written by John Logan (Hugo, Gladiator, Aviator) as a two-movie arc. Production on 24 may start this time next year to accommodate a fall 2014 release; it's possible the two films will also be shot back-to-back.

Michael Pitt (Boardwalk Empire) joins Tony-winner Nina Arianda to star in the crime thriller Rob The Mob, scripted by Jonathan Fernandez. Based on a true story, the film follows a couple who target and rob some of New York's biggest mobsters.

Mirimax and Fathom events are joining forces to bring two of Quentin Tarantino's two biggest films to theaters for one night only for each. "Tarantino XX: Reservoir Dogs 20th Anniversary Event" will be simulcast Tuesday, December 4, and "Tarantino XX: Pulp Fiction Event" will follow two days later, with evening shows and some matinees in select markets. (Hat tip to Crimespree.)

Omnimystery News has a new trailer for the thriller Broken City, featuring an ex-cop Billy Taggart (Mark Wahlberg) seeking redemption and revenge after being double-crossed and then framed by its most powerful figure, the mayor (Russell Crowe). The film opens in theaters January 18th, 2013.

TV

Mira Sorvino has been chosen to star in TNT's pilot Trooper, produced by Jerry Bruckheimer. Sorvino will play a recently divorced and unconventional female state trooper whose trooper partner is a widowed father with a by-the-book approach to policing.

Rebecca Romijn has signed on to co-star with Jon Tenney in the TNT pilot King And Maxwell, from CBS TV Studios and Shane Brennan (NCIS). The characters and show are adapted from novels by David Baldacci and follow Sean King (Tenney) and Michelle Maxwell (Romijn), an atypical pair of private investigators.

The young British actress Hayley Atwell will play a policewoman who becomes obsessed with tracking down the killer of a 15-year-old girl in ITV’s just-commissioned Life Of Crime. The series will follow Atwell's character in three parts over three decades.

The pilot for a TV series based on the Beverly Hills Cop films continues to go forward. Eddie Murphy will reprise his role as Axel Foley, and Brandon T Jackson is in talks to play Axel's son Aaron Foley, a Beverly Hills police officer attempting to establish himself in the shadow of his legendary father, who is now the chief of police in Detroit.

Law & Order producer Barry Schindel is helping spearhead a new legal drama for USA. Titled Shadow Counsel, the series would follow a former Army lawyer recruited reluctantly by the FBI as a “secret” lawyer who operates off the record to circumvent existing roadblocks in classified cases.

Fresh off its recent Emmy, Golden Globe, ITV and BAFTA awards, Showtime's Homeland series was rather predictably renewed for a third season.

CBS gave full-season orders to their freshmen shows Vegas and Sherlock, while the CW's new series, featuring Stephen Amell as the crime-fighter superhero Arrow, has also been given a full season order.

USA gave the go-ahead to an unscripted docu-drama series, Partners in Crime. The show will focus on defense attorneys Mario Gallucci and Big Lou Gelormino as they take on infamous criminal cases and "are like brothers behind the courtroom scene, complete with bickering and family meals featuring spaghetti and buffalo meatballs."

PODCASTS/VIDEO

John Grisham appeared on the Colbert Report, talking about his rivalry with Stephen King, his days as a starving lawyer, and his latest book, The Racketeer.

From EuroCrime: A new daily series about European Crime Writing has started on BBC Radio 4 and the Martin Beck Killings, starring Steven Mackintosh, will begin on the 27th, all available for download.

THEATER

Baltimore's Center Stage is presenting The Completely Fictional—Utterly True—Final Strange Tale of Edgar Allan Poe through November 25. Written by Stephen Thorne and directed by Curt Columbus, the play touches on the morbid life and mysterious final days of Edgar Allen Poe, played by actor Bruce Nelson.

Dangerous Lady, a stage adaptation of one of Martina Cole's bestselling crime thrillers, is currently playing at the Theatre Royal Stratford East in London, and the Guardian has a review.

After a long battle to secure the stage rights to the 1942 story "Rear Window" by Cornell Woolrich (made into Alfred Hitchcock's classic film), it appears that a Broadway adaptation is finally on track. Director Jay Russell and producer Charlie Lyons are on board, along with with Homeland actor Tim Guinee.

GAMES/COMICS

From Omnimystery News: The first "Sherlock Holmes" game for the Nintendo 3DS was released this week in the UK and Nordic countries.

During at panel at the recent Comic Con in New York, it was announced that "2000 AD" editor Matt Smith will be writing a "Judge Dredd: Year One" miniseries for IDW Publishing, and writer John Wagner, who created Judge Dredd along with artist Carlos Ezquerra, will return as the writer of the "Judge Dredd" series in 2013. Dredd is an American law enforcement officer in a violent city of the future where uniformed Judges combine
the powers of police, judge, jury and executioner.

Friday's Forgotten Books - Let's Talk of Graves, Worms and Epitaphs

Robert Furneaux Jordan (1905–1978) was an English architect, architectural critic for The Observer, taught as Hoffmann-Wood Professor of Architecture in the University of Leeds and was a visiting Professor of Architecture at Syracuse University in the U.S. If you conduct a bibliographical search under his given name, you'll find he penned the nonfiction reference books A Concise History Of Western Architecture and Victorian Architecture, among others.

In 1945, Jordan published a detective novel under the pen name Robert Player, and eventually wrote four more standalone mystery novels over the next 32 years. In the Foreword to the Black Dagger edition of Player's novel Let's Talk of Graves, of Worms and Epitaphs, author and past Crime Writers Assocation Chairman Robert Richardson noted that Player's name rarely appears in standard works about the genre, but "there is an inescapable feeling that, had he devoted himself to writing, he would be recognized as, if not a master, then certainly a gifted and entertaining talent. Literate and ingenious, his books have originality and a capacity to attract."

The novel opens with the line, "It is not every man whose father was both a pope and a murderer." The pope in question is Barnabas Barbellion, a distinguished Anglican clergyman who converted to Catholocism and later became Pope Paschal the Fourth. But years prior, Barbellion was married with two children and also having an affair with Philippa, the wife of his neighbor, Harold Gatsby. When Gatsby is poisoned to death at a croquet party, Philippa is accused of the murder a sensational trial ensues, but no one dares to connect the case with the fact that Barbellion's ailing wife had also died suddenly, except for the narrator, Barbellion's son Augustine Xavier.

The title of the novel is taken from Shakespeare's play Richard II about the British king whose greed, thirst for greater power and disdain for both friends and subjects prove to be his undoing. Despite the darkness of that tragedy, Player's novel is actually rather wickedly funny satire, chock-full of intricate details and tricky plotting and character development that culminates in a twist ending. The density of the writing can bog a bit at times, and it's not the type of book that makes for a quick read, but if you're a fan of historical mysteries and religious lampoonery, Player's novel may be to your taste.

Mystery Melange

Carousel book sculpture by Cara Barer.

Twitter is hosting a Twitter Fiction Festival in November and is inviting "authors and creative storytellers around the world to push the bounds of what’s possible with Twitter content." The proposal must fit into the time window of the five day festival—but that means that a project could run for the length of the festival, or just for an hour.

The Booksellers Association's IndieBound is adding a consumer website of "inspired recommendations" for readers from independent booksellers. The goal is to have booksellers submit book recommendations for titles they have loved, hidden gems, mid-list classics, or simply books selling well, to build up an "antidote to algorithm-based, chart-led, celebrity-endorsed book recommendations."

Actor Johnny Depp is partnering with Harper Collins to start a new literary imprint called Infinitum Nihil. It will publish titles reflecting Mr. Depp's eclectic tastes and interests, although only two have been mentioned thus far, a new work about Bob Dylan by the historian Douglas Brinkley and an unpublished novel by the folk singer Woody Guthrie.

A new study from the Pew Research Center about the reading habits of young people contained a few surprises: more than eight in ten Americans between the ages of 16 and 29 read a book in the past year; a majority of Americans from the ages of 16 through 29 still frequent libraries; and readers under 30 who read electronically were more likely to read books on a cellphone or a computer than a dedicated eReader.

Here's an intriguing idea from Houston: a roaming bookmobile library that "facilitates serendipitous discoveries in many different locations." The founders, librarians, Kelly Allen and Chris Grawl, call it the Billy Pilgrim Traveling Library (BPTL) and envision it as both a free range bookmobile (operating on a rent-barter-donate system) and a bookmobile-for-hire to public libraries, museums, schools, and local businesses.

Coming up this weekend are four different literary festivals ranging from Texas to Canada. The QuebeCrime Festival features special guests Laura Lippman, Mark Billingham and Linwood Barclay; Magna cum Murder in Muncie, Indiana, welcomes Guest of Honor S.J. Rozan and Banquet Speaker Eric G. Wilson; the Boston Book Festival, which is light on crime fiction but does include Dennis Lehane and Hank Phillippi Ryan, among many other authors of interest; and the Texas Book Festival in Austin will feature close to 300 authors, including Michael Ennis, Jasper Fforde, Amelia Gray, Janice Hamrick, Stephen Saylor, Roland Smith, Ellis Weiner and Reavis Z. Wortham.

Want to win a trip to France? Omnimystery News brought to my attention that publisher Le French Book is offering just that as part of a promotion for a new line of translated French crime novels, including The 7th Woman, winner of the 2007 Prix du Quai des Orfèvres for best unpublished crime novel manuscript. But hurry - you have to enter by October 29th.

Writing Crime Fiction

For all you authors, newbies and wannabes, there are some new (and recent) reference books on the craft of writing crime fiction that may be of interest.

The 12 award-winning thriller writers who constitute Top Suspense have banded together to share everything they know about their craft in the book Writing Crime Fiction. Joel Goldman has advice and tips on "going indie"; Vicki Hendricks offers secrets to sizzling sex scenes; Stephen Gallagher and Ed Gorman write on what it takes to start and finish that first novel; Hollywood veterans Lee Goldberg and Paul Levine give insights into how to turn your crime thriller into a TV series or movie; Libby Hellmann and Max Allan Collins describe how to ratchet up your book's suspense; Dave Zeltserman discusses noir fiction, while Naomi Hirahara discusses the perfect amateur sleuth; Harry Shannon writes about paranormal thrillers; and the prolific Bill Crider will tell you the secrets to writing more than a hundred thrillers.

Edited by Michelle Spring and Laurie R. King, the Arvon Book of Crime and Thriller Writing comes out of a series of professional writing courses by published writers and gathers the advice into a practical handbook. The book features fascinating insights from twenty-six top crime-writing guests including Lee Child, P.D James, and Ian Rankin and is a detailed, practical guide to writing every kind of crime story, from classic whodunits to fast-paced thrillers. The book's objective is to bring together some of the lessons and insights that the authors and contributors have learned over their careers, to help the readers to free their creative minds, while also studying the solid technique behind writing in this genre. It's divided into three sections: Part 1 – Essays on critical issues in the genre; Part 2: Guest Writers – 25 contributors offering advice and tips; Part 3: How To Write Crime.

Journalist and fiction writer Craig McDonald collected and edited Rogue Males: Conversations & Confrontations. The collection features "no-holds-barred" interviews with 16 authors who have shaped and defined narrative fiction and songwriting, including Elmore Leonard and James Crumley (in one of his last interviews); premier stylists James Sallis and Daniel Woodrell; noir kingpins James Ellroy and Ken Bruen, and top thriller writers Lee Child and Randy Wayne White. Stephen J. Cannell and Max Allan Collins hold forth on the intersection of crime novels and the silver screen while Andrew Vachss, Pete Dexter, Craig Holden, Alistair MacLeod, Tom Russell and Kinky Friedman round-out the collection on the craft of writing.

Media Murder for Monday

MOVIES

It's been almost 30 years since the television series Mike Hammer, based on the novels by Mickey Spillane and starring Stacy Keach as the iconic private eye. Now, Warner Bros. has acquired the feature film rights to the "Mike Hammer" novels, although details are sketchy on the concept for any potential movies. (With thanks to Omnimystery News for the tip.)

Filming will soon start on Ombra Films' project, Mindscape, scripted by Guy Holmes and directed by Jorge Dorado, with a cast that includes Mark Strong, Taissa Farmiga and Brian Cox. The plot follows a man with the ability to enter people’s memories who tries to determine if a 16-year-old girl is a psychopath, a victim of trauma, or both.

Universal Pictures continues to pursue its remake of the gangster film Scarface, hiring Paul Attanasio to rewrite the movie from the original draft by David Ayer. The plan is to reimagine Scarface in a contemporary setting, rather than have it be a remake or a sequel.

The first film based on James Patterson's fictional detective Alex Cross, with Tyler Perry as the famous Washington D.C. crimefighter/psychologist, opened just this past Friday (to mixed reviews), but a sequel is apparently already in the works.

Universal Pictures and producer Scott Stuber have optioned the Derek Haas spy thriller novel The Right Hand. The book is focused on Austin Clay, a spy whose work is so covert that the government won’t even admit he exists, sent to track down a missing American operative in Russia.

Blackout, an action thriller based on a script by Sidney King, is closer to becoming a movie project. The plot centers on a cop transporting a mysterious and dangerous criminal across town when a city-wide blackout plunges them into darkness and chaos.

TV

The CWA handed out the winners for its film/TV Dagger Awards last Thursday. The Film Dagger went to Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, while the The TV Dagger was given to Sherlock: Series 2. Other awards included The International TV Dagger to The Bridge; The Best Actress Dagger to Claire Danes for Homeland; The Best Actor Dagger to Benedict Cumberbatch for Sherlock; The Best Supporting Actress Dagger to Kelly Macdonald for Boardwalk Empire; The Best Supporting Actor Dagger to Martin Freeman for Sherlock. Also, the Best Detective Duo chosen by public vote was awarded to Lewis' DI Robbie Lewis and DS James Hathaway. (Hat tip The Rap Sheet.)

BBC America renewed its historical police procedural series Copper for a second season. The series, which centers on an Irish immigrant cop (played by Tom Weston-Jones) in 1864 New York, premiered in August with 1.1 million total viewers, the largest audience ever for a BBC America series debut.

CBS ordered two crime drama pilots, a project set in New Orleans titled The Big Easy, and Darkness Falls, a police procedural of sorts, in which an FBI psychologist and a homicide specialist "journey into small communities around the country to solve the darkest, most twisted single murders."

ABC bought American rights to the Dutch series Sea Of Fire, which will be adapted by Steve Maeda (The X-Files) and produced by Sony Pictures TV. The original series centered on three teenage girls who star in a pornographic film, a decision that "tears their families apart and leads to a disappearance, a murder and host of other secrets boiling under the surface."

Crime Time Preview summarizes upcoming crime dramas to be broadcast on BBC and ITV in the UK, some of which will show up in U.S. markets later in the year (e.g. Sherlock with Benedict Cumberbatch and John Freeman).

PODCASTS

Patricia Cornwell joined CBS's This Morning to promote her new novel, The Bone Bed, and noted that she was "the pop culture mother of CSI."

Friday's "Forgotten" Books - A Time for Pirates

Oswald Wynd (1913-1998) was born in Japan, the son of a Baptist missionary from Scotland. Wynd's family moved to the U.S. in the 1930s, where Wynd attended High School in Atlantic City, then later back to Scotland. Wynd's studies at Edinburgh University were interrupted by the outbreak of the Second World War, and in 1941 Wynd's unit in Malaysia was attacked and Wynd imprisoned in Hokkaido mines.

Upon the end of the War and Wynd's liberation as a POW, he returned to the U.S. and on a whim decided to enter a "first novel" contest  by publisher Doubleday in 1947. The novel, Black Fountains, about a young American-educated Japanese caught up in the war, won first prize. Another novel, The Ginger Tree, was turned into a television series by the BBC, with NHK, Japan and WGBH Boston.

But it was under the pen name of Gavin Black that Wynd wrote his thrillers, fifteen in all, most featuring Paul Harris, a young man with a Scottish background making a living as an unconventional businessman in Asian countries like Singapore and Malaysia. The first, Suddenly At Singapore, was published in 1960, and the last, Night Run From Java, in 1979. A Time For Pirates lies right in the middle of the series.

Set in Kuala Lumpur, A Time for Pirates finds Paul Harris rescuing damsel in distress Jean Hyde from a rioting mob. Unfortunately for Harris, the beautiful blonde damsel is the wife of a geologist looking for oil on behalf of a Chinese company Min Kow Lin, and Harris has been fighting to save Malaysia from Communism. He decides to delve into the oil business to try and find out why Min Kow Lin is disguising its oil exploration as prospecting for less valuable minerals and why it's buying a rubber plantation.

With the assistance of his "humor challenged" Sikh bookeeper Bahadur, Harris investigates whether the nasty business he's stumbled onto is really a Communist plot or a capitalist scheme to deny poor Malaysians the rights and profits from the oil. After two kidnap attempts, a near-fatal fight with a Manchu thug, and an arson attack that burns down his house, Harris begins to suspect that the man who wants him dead isn't an outsider, but a friend.

The Independent said of Black that he wrote "superior and literate thrillers - school of Stevenson and Buchan - which were at the same time witty and clever, and moved at a by no means gentlemanly pace." The intriguing characters and details of the exotic setting of newly-independent but unstable Malaysia and the clashes between the native population, Communists and Western enterpreneurs are well drawn and the writing is descriptive, as in this one passage:

It was a long time since I had walked up my drive. The gradient is steep, an asphalt razor cut on a slope packed with jungle hardwoods...snakes which reach my antiseptic woods are there isn't a stagnant pool anywhere in which mosquitoes can breed. Sometimes monkeys come on excursions from the adjacent public gardens to try out the long drops from high branches, but they never seem to stay long, as though the surrounding intense hygiene is too much for them. I wish they would set up a colony near me; I like them, they are a continuing and salutary rebuke to our pretensions.

Black Dagger Crime reprinted A Time for Pirates in 1971, and a Fontana First Thus edition came out in May 1973, but they're hard to find. However, Langtail Press Limited, with a mission to bring back crime and mystery novels that have been out of print or unavailable, made new print and eBook versions of Black's novel in December 2010.

Author R&R with D.J. McIntosh

D.J. (Dorothy) McIntosh is the former co-editor of the Crime Writers of Canada's newsletter, Fingerprints, and is a Toronto-based writer of novels and short mystery fiction. Her short story "The Hounds of Winter" was nominated for the 2008 Arthur Ellis Award for Best Short Story.

Her first novel, The Witch of Babylon, was short-listed for the Crime Writers Association Debut Dagger Award, and won a Crime Writers of Canada Arthur Ellis Award for best unpublished (at the time) novel. The trade paperback version, published in Canada last year, was named "One of Six Enduring Historical Thrillers" by CNN (along with works by Umberto Eco, Wilbur Smith, Kate Mosse, Agatha Christie, and Dan Brown), and honored as one of Amazon.ca’s Best Books of 2011. The hardcover version debuts in the U.S. this week.

The book is set in modern-day New York City and Iraq and follows street-smart Turkish-American art dealer John Madison, who is caught up in the aftermath of the looting of the Baghdad Museum. A race to beat the bad guys to an mysterious ancient Assyrian treasure leads Madison on an international treasure-hunting adventure of lost relics, ancient sorcery, alchemy and the Mesopotamian cult of Ishtar. Author Louise Penny said of the novel, "I think The Witch of Babylon is going to blow everyone’s socks off, and Dorothy McIntosh will establish herself in the pantheon of Canadian writers."

D.J. is on a blog tour this week and stopped by to take some Author R&R (Reference and Research) with In Reference to Murder:

If there were ten rules for writing, one of them almost certainly would be “write what you know.” We authors hear that over and over again. I chose another path because I felt passionate about my subjects. My lack of knowledge didn’t stop me but it did necessitate years of research.

One way to look at a novel is as an extended lie; it is fiction after all! A writer’s job is to convince readers that what is fabricated is real and the more skillfully achieved, the more enjoyable the read. My approach was to pack as many facts and recognizable place names or other elements into the book as possible without diluting the story. That’s why I’d never choose a fictional city for a setting. The liberal use of ‘facts’ though, whether historical or contemporary, means that research has to be comprehensive.

The Witch of Babylon is set in two locations, New York City and Iraq. The challenge with New York was to find unique venues as the city has been written about so well and so often. Not being a New York native compounded the issue. It took three separate visits to find these venues, a welcome task I must say as I love the city so much.

I started by wandering, to the Village, Harlem, Hell’s Kitchen (now called the much less colorful Clinton) and the Lower East side. New York is a bountiful feast for authors because almost everywhere, something – a building, a park, an elevated rail line, a store window – catches our attention. I found a fantastic gothic high rise with terraces and gargoyles sprouting at the roof line, an abandoned steel arch bridge spanning the Harlem River and the Dominican Church of Saint Vincent Ferrer, not as well known as the cathedrals but exquisitely beautiful with remarkable stained glass windows, candle lit chapels and saintly relics. My love of music took me to Kenny’s Castaways, a historic New York music club that nurtured stars like Bruce Springsteen and Patti Smith in the early days. These are just a few of the many gems I discovered.

Iraq presented the opposite problem. The Witch is set in 2003 at the advent of the war so it was impossible to visit there. To paint a convincing picture of Baghdad and Mosul in the north, I relied on hundreds of newspaper articles, photos, blogs written by Iraqi civilians, journalists and soldiers and books (notably Thieves of Baghdad by Matthew Bogdanos and William Patrick) detailing the looting and recovery of antiquities from the Iraq Museum. I watched many hours of television war coverage and you-tube videos. One of these taken in real time by a soldier that showed a high wall of sand as it swept toward a military encampment, left an indelible impression. There was a wealth of material to choose from and I’m so grateful to the bloggers, reporters and photojournalists who risked their lives to bring us the story of the war.

The third major research area concerned history. Mesopotamian achievements easily equal those of the Egyptians but surprisingly, little has been recently written about them for the lay reader. My main source was a book: The Might That Was Assyria by H.W. Saggs supplemented by lots of internet searches. Speaking with university professors helped enormously as well. Research turned up many fascinating facts. I had no idea for example, that a Babylonian scholar first posited that the earth revolves around the sun or that, in the Parthian era a rudimentary battery was developed more than a millennium before the modern version, or that the alchemy had its beginnings in perfume making. Learning about the three great Mesopotamian cultures, Sumerian, Assyrian and Babylonian, was so fascinating it became a pastime I really looked forward to. All three novels – Book 2 and 3 to come – focus on some aspect of Mesopotamian history. So by not following “write what you know” whole new worlds opened up to me.

Mystery Melange

Book sculpture by Mike Stilkey

The latest edition of Mystery Scene magazine features a profile of investigative journalist /author Hank Philippi Ryan talking about where she gets her ideas; Hollywood screenwriter Attica Locke discusses how her family history is reflected in her writing; John Connolly offers an insightful look at what he considers to be Ross Macdonald's crowning achievement, The Chill; Martin Edwards considers the stellar career of Robert Barnard; Larry Block bares all in "Now We Call It Mid-Century Erotica"; and Kevin Burton Smith offers "Mystery Fiction Action Figures We'd Like to See."  Plus, G.M. Malliet discusses James Thurber in a special online essay feature.

The latest crime poem is up over at the 5-2, an offering titled "Kilmahog" by Nigel Bird. Gerald So, editor over at the 5-2, also has an open call for holiday-themed crime poems set around Christmas or New Year's. Send 'em along by November 30th.

There is still time to buy tickets to the QuébeCrime Writers Festival coming up Thursday, October 25 to Saturday, October 27. Among the authors scheduled to attend are Linwood Barclay, Mark Billingham, Giles Blunt, Chelsea Cain, John Connolly, Chris F. Holm, Owen Laukkanen, Laura Lippman, Archer Mayor, and Michael Robotham.

Missed Bouchercon? Criminal Element has a few "mugshots" and "overheard" tidbits.

The University of South Alabama Baldwin County will offer "What about Murder? The Great Mystery Writers from the 'Golden Age' of Crime Fiction to the Present Day," a non-credit course this fall Tuesdays from Nov. 1-15 at the Fairhope campus. The course will focus on the life and major writings of six mystery and crime writers, including G.K. Chesterton, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ellery Queen, P.D. James, Colin Dexter and Stieg Larsson. 

There's still time to register for MWA (Mystery Writers of America) University to be held October 27th in Charlotte. One of the instructors will be Nancy Pickard, and the core curriculum will include topics like "Dramatic Structure and Plot" and "Character."

Every week seems to launch a new trend or approach to digital publishing, with many of these companies hoping to shake up the world of publishing. StoryBundle is a pay-what-you-want indie book publishing site founded by former Gizmodo and Lifehacker editor Jason Chen that releases bundles of theme-curated eBooks. Its latest bundle is a group of thriller and crime novels.

Meanwhile, Harper Collins' new imprint, Bourbon Street Books, yesterday launched its line of trade paperbacks with the reissue of four Lord Peter Wimsey novels by Dorothy L. Sayers. The four titles, Strong Poison, Have His Carcase, Gaudy Night, and Busman's Honeymoon incorporate new designs and an introduction by contemporary bestselling mystery author, Elizabeth George.