Mystery Melange

Edgar Allan Poe book sculpture

A Memorial Gathering for the late Canadian mystery author Lou Allin is scheduled for Sunday, September 14, 2-4:30 p.m. in Victoria, BC. Mystery Fanfare has all the details.

All Due Respect magazine, edited by Chris Rhatigan and Mike Monson, has brought readers "uncensored, kick-ass" short crime fiction since 2010, and now they've started publishing collections, novellas, and novels under the All Due Respect Books imprint. They're starting off with You Don’t Exist, a book of two novellas by Chris Rhatigan and Pablo D’Stair, and plan on releasing one title per month. For updates and more info, you can head on over to the ADR blog.

The Clark Library at the University of Michigan is featuring interactive literary maps of the United States in an online exhibition, including several mystery authors. (Hat tip to Elizabeth Foxwell.)

Meanwhile, the New York Public Library blog profiled several "Mysteries with a Sense of Place."

The Yorkshire town of Temple Newsam, Leeds, in the UK is aiming for a new Guinness World Records title for the Most People Dressed as Sherlock Holmes. On August 31, entrants who pay the £15 fee will receive a Deerstalker hat, pipe and magnifying glass. Organizers hope for at least 250 people, the number needed to set the record, and are using proceeds from the event to help raise money for the Yorkshire Brain Research Centre at the Leeds Teaching Hospitals.

Mystery Readers Journal editor Janet Rudolph is looking for 500 to 1,500 word personal essays from authors about their books featuring bibliomysteries for the next issue of the magazine. The deadline for submissions is September 5.  

The winners of the annual Bulwer Lytton contest for "worst writing" were announced. Elizabeth Dorfman of Bainbridge Island, WA, is the 32nd grand prize winner, and you can read her woefully wonderful entry here.

The weekly crime poem at the 5-2 is "The Morning of" by Tom Brzezina. To maintain the flow of submissions year-round, 5-2 editor Gerald So is instituting a voluntary theme each week, challenging poets to write about crimes beginning with a particular letter of the alphabet.

The Q&A roundup this week includes a conversation with James Lee Burke at Omnimystery News; Matthew McBride chatted with the Mystery People about A Swollen Red Sun; and Marton Limon joined the MP folks to talk about his latest, The Iron Sickle.