The Los Angeles Times Book Awards announced their finalist lists for 2016. The Mystery/Thriller category nods this year include:
- Lou Berney, The Long and Faraway Gone
- Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Sympathizer
- Brian Panowich, Bull Mountain
- Richard Price, The Whites
- Don Winslow, The Cartel
As part of the 2016 Edgar Awards Week, the Mysterious Bookshop will host an evening featuring members of Mystery Writers of America, the Edgar Award nominees, bestselling authors, and publisher representatives. As the MWA put it, it's an "unusual opportunity to meet some of the best and brightest in the mystery world" and takes place on April 26th at 6 p.m. For more information on all of the Edgar Week festivities, including a symposium on April 27 (featuring a one-on-one interview with the 2016 Grand Master, Walter Mosley), check out the MWA website.
The UK's National Literacy Trust and the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society have launched an award in memory of the late mystery author Ruth Rendell. The prize is for an author or writer who has worked towards raising literacy levels in the UK, either through their writing and books or through their advocacy and championing of the cause of literacy. Schools, charities, libraries, booksellers and individuals can nominate candidates via the NLT website by the May 31. (HT to Janet Rudolph.)
Coming in March, Dean Street Press will be completing their reissues of Annie Hayne's 1920's crime fiction by releasing all five of her stand-alone mysteries, complementing the Inspector Furnival and Inspector Stoddart series already published. As DSP's Rupert Heath noted, Hayne's mysteries "show a distinct bridge between Victorian/Edwardian fiction and an innovative strain in which some of the motifs of golden age crime fiction were established."
More sad news from the publishing world: Five Star is dropping its mystery line to focus on the Western and Frontier Fiction lines. Since 2000, the imprint has published exclusively first edition books, many of which went on to earn starred reviews, Edgar Award and Anthony Award nominations, and land on bestseller lists. Apparently, Five Star will be honoring its already-signed contracts for books in the pipeline.
In more publishing changes in the winds, Penguin has merged its Berkley imprint into the unified Putnam and Dutton group. In reporting the change, Publishers Weekly surmised that on its surface, the changes look as though PRH is trying to cut back its number of mass market titles that are losing much of their market share to e-books. Penguin Publishing Group President Madeline McIntosh emphasized Berkley remains committed to publishing mass market paperbacks, while continuing to "refine the size of the list in order to ensure optimum results per title."
At one time, mass market paperbacks revolutionized the publishing industry, and the Paperback Revolution blog posted a nice overview of the Collins Crime Club, launched in 1930, and its competition with Penguin in helping to bring authors like Agatha Christie, John Rhode, Freeman Wills Crofts, and Philip Macdonald to a wider audience.
Writing for Disclaimer Magazine, Graham Kirby investigated the mystery of the long neglect of Gladys Mitchell, a relic of the fabled Golden Age of Detective Fiction.
After we lost author Harper Lee last week, who died at the age of 89, Adam Wagner made the case for "three reasons Harper Lee was almost a crime writer."
Your mileage will undoubtedly vary, but Danilo Castro of the website CinemaNerdz picked out his list of "The 20 Best Detective Movies of All Time."
New research concluded that robots could learn human values by reading books. Mark Riedl and Brent Harrison from the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology recently unveiled Quixote, a prototype system able to learn social conventions from simple stories.
Think you took a long time to return that overdue library book? Mental Floss compiled a listing of "11 Ridiculously Overdue Library Books (That Were Finally Returned)."
Did William Shakespeare have a secret son who grew up to become the poet laureate of England? A new biography by Simon Andrew Stirling claims he did.
The new crime poem at the 5-2 this week is "Grandiflora" by Rosemarie Keenan.
In the Q&A roundup, Craig Sisterson welcomed Aussie-Scot author Helen Fitzgerald to take the "9mm Interview" challenge; Gary Phillips stopped by Omnimystery News to chat about the new collection of three of his crime novellas titled 3 the Hard Way (Down & Out Books); Lauren Carr also joined ON to discuss her new mystery in the Mac Faraday series, Cancelled Vows; and the Mystery People snared Minerva Koenig to talk about her second Julia Kalas book, South of Nowhere.
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