Mystery Melange

Book sculpture by Long-Bin-Chen

The recent Deadly Ink conference announced the winner of this year's David Award for crime fiction:  Dark Music by E. F. Watkins. The other finalists included Lethal Treasure by Jane Cleland; There Was an Old Woman by Hallie Ephron; Condemned to Repeat by Janice MacDonald; and The Wrong Girl by Hank Phillippi Ryan. (With thanks to the Rap Sheet.)

The longlist for this year's Ngaio Marsh Award was whittled down to four finalists: Joe Victim by Paul Cleave; Frederick's Coast by Alan Duff; My Brother's Keeper by Donna Malane; and Where the Dead Men Go by Liam McIlvanney.

Shots Magazine's Ayo Onatade reported that readers will decide the longlist for the CWA Dagger in the Library Award for the first time ever. Fans anywhere can nominate their favorite authors online, with the ten authors receiving the most votes making up the long list. Nominations opened August 1st and close on September 1st, with the winner announced in November.

Thanks to Ayo also for news that the Orion Publishing Group is going to publish the complete collection of Inspector Rebus short stories by bestselling novelist Ian Rankin in October.

This week marked the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the first world war. David Prestridge picked out "The best World War I crime fiction" for the Crime Fiction Lover blog.

John Curran, author of the Edgar nominated and Agatha award-winning Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks reported that the Torquay Museum in the UK is facing devastating budget cuts that may ultimately cause it to close its doors after 140 years. The museum is the only one of its kind devoted to the Queen of Crime, including such exhibits as the film set of a Poirot production and Agatha Christie’s personal effects. Fans are encouraged to voice their support to help keep the institution going.

Thanks to Sandra Seamans for posting two new short-story markets (here and here):  Fictionvale is looking for punk stories, any kind of punk from steam to diesel and everything in between, and Pulp Core is a new market looking for short genre fiction to be translated from English to German.

Mike Ripley posted his latest Getting Away with Murder column for Shots Ezine, discussing all things crime fiction across the Pond: the first-ever What’s Your Poison? Crime Evening held in Heffers Bookshop; the Commissario Ricciardi mysteries set in Naples in the early 1930s, by Italian crime writer Maurizio De Giovanni; news that bookseller Ralph Spurrier (a.k.a. The Postmortem Man) has been busy shooting second-unit action scenes for the next James Bond film; and his latest book reviews and author news.

This week's crime poem at the 5-2 is "Visiting My Great Aunt, Maude" by Louie Clay.

The Q&A roundup this week includes Lee Thompson talking with The Mystery People about his new-this-week hardboiled novel A Beautiful Madness; Terrie Farley Moran stops by Cozy Mystery Book Reviews to talk about her debut novel, Well Read, Then Dead; and Stuart Nevill tells the Irish Post about his inspirations, latest crime novel and the "alien world" of being a writer.