Mystery Melange

Tucson, Arizona's Clues Unlimited mystery bookstore is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. As owner Christine Burke puts it, Clues Unlimited is "exactly what it started out to be: a niche place to get a good crime/mystery novel and an owner with the experience and knowledge to know what her customers like to read." (Hat tip to Shelf Awareness.)

The National Post took a look at how crime fiction author John D. MacDonald invented a subgenre that’s no longer his own, the "Florida author subgenre."

The Seattle Mystery Bookstore blog profiled Tom Adams Uncovered, the story of one of the world’s greatest cover artists told through his iconic 1960s and 1970s Agatha Christie paperback designs. Adams was commissioned by Fontana in the UK and Pocket Books in the USA to paint covers for almost every Agatha Christie book, most of them more than once, totaling around 150 different paintings over two decades.

Barbara Fister noted that while women make up more than half of mystery writers, they get fewer reviews than male authors, especially when it comes to genre-focused publications, edited websites, and national newspapers. This is an issue that's been around for a while (and is the reason Sisters in Crime was initially founded), but as Fister points out, this form of subtle discrimination still exists. But according to VIDA: Women in Literary Arts, things might be changing a little bit for the better in general fiction, if not crime fiction.

David Prestidge continues his Gazetteer of British Crime for the Crime Fiction Lover blog, this time tackling Northern Ireland. Previous installments covered the West Midlands, North East, South West, East Anglia and Scotland.

Writing for the Men's Journal, Sarah Weinman compiled a listing of "The 10 Best True Crime Books."

Dr. Philip A. Mackowia rounded up a group of forensic medical experts to take part in the Historical Clinicopathological Conference, playing medical sleuth to piece together a historical figure's cause of death, including such luminaries as Herod the Great, Pericles, Mozart, and Akhenaten.

The Guardian's Tom Gauld whipped up an illustration of "some murder methods for modern mystery writers."

The new crime poem over at the 5-2 Weekly is "For the Love of Death" by Shirley J. Brewer.

In the Q&A roundup, thriller author Barry Eisler spoke with The Huffington Post about his new novel The God's Eye View, which introduces Evie Gallagher, an NSA analyst; Jake Woodhouse took the 9mm Interview Challenge from KiwiCrime about his Amsterdam-set series featuring Inspector Jaap Rykel; the Mystery People interrogated George Weir about his new quirky novel Errant Knight; the MP's also took a stab at Joe R. Lansdale, talking about Honky Tonk Samurai, which heralds the return of Joe R. Lansdale’s Hap and Leonard; and the Houston Chronicle chatted with Lisa Gardner about her new book, Find Her.