Mystery Melange

Congratulations to the winners of this year's Arthur Ellis Awards for excellence in Canadian crime writing. Best Novel went to C.C. Humphreys for Plague; Best First novel to Steve Burrows, Siege of Bitterns; Best Novella to Jas. R. Petrin, "A Knock on the Door," Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine; Best Short Story to Margaret Atwood, "Stone Mattress." For all the winners and nominees, check out this list from CrimeSpree Magazine.

Sophie Henaff is the recipient of the 10th Arsène Lupin Prize for Crime Fiction for her novel Grilled Chicken, published by Éditions Albin Michel. The prize was established in honor of author Maurice Leblanc and his fictional creation Detective Lupin, often called the French version of Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes.

The winners of the Lamba Liberary "Lammy" Awards celebrating LGBT fiction were announced, including the winners of the Best Gay Mystery Novel, Blackmail, My Love: A Murder Mystery, by Katie Gilmartin, and Best Lesbian Mystery, The Old Deep and Dark-A Jane Lawless Mystery, Ellen Hart.

The Audio Publishers Association (APA) announced the winners for its 2015 Audie Awards honoring spoken word entertainment, including Best Mystery, The Silkworm by Robert Galbraith as narrated by Robert Glenister; and Best Thriller, Those Who Wish Me Dead by Michael Koryta, as narrated by Robert Petkoff.

Australian author Jane Harper was awarded Victorian Premier's Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript, receiving $15,000 for her crime novel, The Dry.

Kate Flora won the Crime Fiction Book Award category in the 2015 Maine Literary Awards for her book And Grant You Peace. (HT Mystery Fanfare)

Mystery Readers NorCal's next Literary Salon will feature Carola Dunn on Thursday, June 11 in Berkeley, CA. Carola Dunn is the author of over 50 mysteries, including the latest in her Daisy Dalrymple series, Superfluous Women.

The British Library is re-issuing Lois Austen-Leigh’s The Incredible Crime, hailed as “the very essence of mystery” when it was first published in 1931. Austen-Leigh is the granddaughter of Jane Austen’s nephew, and her mystery hasn't been in print for eighty years.

Mike Ripley's latest Getting Away with Murder column for Shots Ezine includes recaps of the launch of Killer Women, a group of London-based female crime writers, and also the Margery Allingham Society’s commemoration of what would be the 111th birthday of one of the great "Queens of Crime." As Ripley notes, all of Allingham's novels are being reissued by Vintage over the next twelve months.
 
Publishers Weekly profiled Crooked Lane Books, a new crime fiction imprint that debuted at BEA with its fall titles.

Keith Rawson, writing for LitReator, profiled "5 Crime Short Story Writers You Should Be Reading Right Now," including Friday's Forgotten Books' own Patti Abbott.

Elizabeth Foxwell notes that the people behind the Johannsen and LeBlanc dime novel collections at Northern Illinois University are inviting reviews by scholars, students, and fans of the 19th- and 20th-century dime novels offered on its revamped Web site. So far, they've scanned 1,000 items in the collection.

Dennis Lehane told the Hay Festival how he went from working class Boston to a life of literary acclaim as he offered up "10 rules for making it as a writer."

Thanks to the success of the first national Independent Bookstore Day held last month in the U.S., plans are in the works for a second annual event on Saturday April 30, 2016.

Amazon compiled its annual list of the "Top 20 Most Well-Read Cities" in the U.S., based on sales for all books, magazines and newspapers sales in both print and Kindle format.

Some James Bond fans will be happy to hear that Pussy Galore is making a comeback. Anthony Horowitz, the latest contemporary novelist to be officially commissioned by the Fleming estate to write a continuation novel, has revealed that the femme fatale will return in Trigger Mortis, which sees the British spy return to 1957 (two weeks after Goldfinger).

The professional hit is the trademark of organized gangs from the Mafia to the Hell’s Angels, and Listverse offered up ten unsolved murders linked to organized crime.

The world's oldest crime? Lethal wounds on a skull may indicate a 430,000 year-old murder.

The new crime poem at the 5-2 is "We Didn't Know" by Bill Baber, while this month's featured story at Beat to a Pulp is "Stray Bullet" by Jerry Bloomfield.

The Q&A roundup includes Catriona McPherson chatting with The Examiner about the award-winning author's mysteries in multiple genres, as well as food, culture, and the crazy ways they can clash; and Suzanne Munshower stopped by Omnimystery News to discuss her new novel Younger.