Mystery Melange

The winners of the Lamda Awards for LGBT fiction were announced last week, with The Old Deep and Dark: A Jane Lawless Mystery by Ellen Hart named best Lesbian Mystery, and Blackmail, My Love: A Murder Mystery by Katie Gilmartin, named Best Gay Mystery.

The finalists for the Macavity Awards were also announced, based on votes from members of Mystery Readers International, subscribers to Mystery Readers Journal, and friends and supporters of MRI. The candidates for Best Novel includeThe Lewis Man, by Peter May; The Last Death of Jack Harbin, by Terry Shames; The Killer Next Door, by Alex Marwood; The Day She Died, by Catriona McPherson; The Missing Place, by Sophie Littlefield; and The Long Way Home, by Louise Penny. For the complete lists in all the categories, check out the Mystery Fanfare blog.

FYI, Mystery Fanfare also posted links to all the Macavity-nominated short stories that you can read for free.

The inaugural St. Albans Writers' Festival in Australia will include a crime writing panel on Saturday, September 19, featuring authors Nigel Bartlett, Barry Maitland, PM Newton and Michael Robotham in conversation with crime fiction aficionado Rachel Franks.

As part of the 125th anniversary celebrations for Agatha Christie, a "treasure trove" of photos of the author from the her private collection will go on display at the Bankside Gallery in London August 26 - September 6. Titled "Agatha Christie: Unfinished Portrait," the exhibition will include notes from her unpublished private correspondences and a timeline highlighting key moments in her career. The collection will then move to the Agatha Christie Festival for display in September. (HT to Crime Fiction Lover.)

Martin Edwards, author of The Golden Age of Murder, spoke with the BBC's history magazine about Agatha Christie and The Detection Club, the "mysterious" social network to which Christie and other major Golden Age writers belonged.

Crime fiction author Mark Billingham, who has also worked as a standup comedian, chatted with The Guardian about a comedy/crime theme running throughout the Theakstons Old Peculier Harrogate crime writing festival this year.

The Journal of the Academic Anglophone Society of Romania is seeking submissions for a special 2017 issue on Contemporary Crime Fiction, guest edited by Dr Charlotte Beyer. The special issue will focus on contemporary crime fiction and trace thematic and formal priorities that emerged during the late 20th to early 21st Century. The deadline for papers is October 1. (HT to Sandra Seamans.)

Writing for the blog of the Library of America, Tom Nolan discussed husband-and-wife mystery authors Ross Macdonald and Margaret Millar and "the traumas that encompassed literature and life" for the successful duo.

The Guardian's Sam Jordison makes the case that Patricia Highsmith’s book Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction is an inspiring primer for budding psycho-crime novelists.

Inkshares is a new company that will offer indie booksellers their own imprint. Seattle-based Ada’s Technical Books became the first to come on board, and the Seattle Mystery Bookshop could be next. The Mystery Bookshop's owner J.B. Dickey explained that an Inkshares imprint could be an opportunity to help midlist authors at a time when so much of publishing seems to focus on bestsellers.

Mental Floss had fun with the article "15 Curious Facts About Sherlock Holmes and the Sherlockian Subculture."

Cannon Hall, the childhood home of Daphne Du Maurier (author of Rebecca and "The Birds"), has sold for around £28million. Regarded by some experts as one of London's finest period homes, the property was a key location in Otto Preminger's 1965 movie thriller Bunny Lake Is Missing, starring Laurence Olivier.  

The new e-issue of Yellow Mama is out, with new crime short stories and poems.

The new crime poem at the 5-2 is "Ice Cream People" by Jennifer Lagier.

In the Q&A roundup, the Mystery People chatted with James W. Ziskin about his series with Sixties-era “girl reporter” Ellie Stone, and also with Mark Pryor about his latest Hugo Marston novel; Col Bury took Paul D. Brazill's "Short, Sharp Interview" challenge; Steven Tyler spoke with Omnimystery News about his new murder mystery featuring amateur sleuth Luna Susan George; South Africa's BooksLive spoke with Joanne Macgregor about her psychological thriller Dark Whispers, recently translated into Afrikaans; Ragnar Jónasson discussed his writing with the Irish Times and how The Murder of Roger Ackroyd had a great impact on him; and the Huffington Post interviewed Don Winslow about his latest drug trafficking novel, Cartel.