Mystery Melange

This year's Crime & Mystery Weekend at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, August 14-16, is dedicated to the late PD James. Highlights will include lectures by special guests Ann Cleves and Alan Bradley, as well as sessions like "Detecting Couples, "The Romance Of The Lone Detective", "Reader, I Murdered Him", and "Love: The Perfect Motive For Murder."

Congratulations to the winners of the second annual Pinckley Prizes for Crime Fiction, named in memory of Diana Pinckley, longtime crime fiction columnist for The New Orleans Times-Picayune. Bestselling author Nevada Barr was honored with the Pinckley Prize for a Distinguished Body of Work, and Adrianne Harun won the Pinckley Prize for a Debut Novel, for A Man Came Out Of A Door In The Mountain.

Keep your eye out for the shortlist for the 2015 Petrona Award for the Best Scandinavian Crime Novel published in English in 2014, which will be announced tomorrow.

A previously unpublished short story by playwright Tennessee Williams appears in the spring issue of the Strand. Titled "The Eye That Saw Death," the work is a horror story with undertones of Edgar Allan Poe, focusing on a man who receives an eye transplant from a convicted killer.

The Stiletto Gang blog welcomed the authors nominated for the Agatha Best First Novel Award, to be announced at the annual Malice Domestic conference.

Time magazine examined the resurgence of the "continuation novel," i.e., those books which author estate reps approve as sequels to the deceased writer's original canon. Examples cites included Benjamin Black's take on Raymond Chandler’s famous PI, Philip Marlowe, as well as William Boyd as Ian Fleming, Sophie Hannah as Agatha Christie, and Anthony Horowitz as Arthur Conan Doyle.

Speaking of Arthur Conan Doyle, was he a victim of a police conspiracy? The Guardian makes the case that the Staffordshire police fabricated evidence to  discredit Doyle’s investigation into the case of a Birmingham solicitor accused of maiming horses and sending poison-pen letters at the turn of the 20th century.

The sight of a drone delivering your Amazon puchase may have taken one step closer; the FAA announced it was issuing an "experimental airworthiness certificate" for the retailer to begin testing of the potential future service.

Inspector Rebus fans can rejoice in the news that Ian Rankin is bringing out the 20th installment in that series about a year's hiatus.

A new app called Clean Reader is arousing the fury of authors everywhere. By allowing readers to swap swear words in their novels with sanitized versions without the approval of authors, the authors claim it sets a dangerous precedent of censorship.

The new featured crime poem at the 5-2 is "True Confessions" by Etta Abrahams.

In the Q&A roundup, David Morrell (author of the Rambo series), chats with the Huffington Post; Hallie Ephron spoke with WBUR about her latest suspense novel, Night Night, Sleep Tight, based on her Hollywood childhood; Declan Burke grilled Richard Beard about the second novel in his trilogy; and Harlan Coben tells The Guardian why "Every successful author still has to treat it as a job."