Mystery Melange

Sisters in Crime Australia and Booktopia announced the longlists for the 16th annual Davitt Awards that celebrate excellence in Aussie crime writing. A short list will be announced mid-July, and the Davitts Award ceremony and presentation of winners will take place on August 22.

The UK's Dead Good Reader Awards are back this year, and the public can vote on the shortlists. Over 2,000 DGR readers nominated their favorite books and authors for the awards.

The July 1 deadline for entering the Golden Donut Short Story Contest is fast approaching. But you only need to write 200 words (exactly 200 words) to enter, with the top 12 entries sent along to final judge, best-selling author Tami Hoag, to choose a winner. The winning entry will receive free registration for a 2017 Writers' Police Academy event. For more information on how to enter, follow this link.

First Monday is a new monthly crime fiction/thriller night held in Central London at the College Building of City University. The upcoming July 4th event, sponsored by Killer Reads, will feature award-winning authors Andrew Taylor, Stephen Booth, Anna Mazzola, and Beth Lewis. The evening will be chaired by Claire McGowan, bestselling author of the Paula Maguire series and senior lecturer on the City University Crime Writing MA course.  (HT to Shots Magazine.)

Last week, we received the sad news that the Mystery Writers of America 2015 Grand Master award recipient Lois Duncan had passed away (April 28, 1934 - June 15, 2016). Duncan was an American writer of children's books, best known for young-adult novels of suspense, including I Know What You Did Last Summer, adapted into the 1997 film. Mystery Fanfare, Writers' Digest, and NPR are among the many tributes that have paid their respects.

In the New Yorker, true crime writer Skip Hollandsworth (The Midnight Assassin) explained why he feels people are fascinated with serial killers. He asserts that serial murder has a special appeal to writers for fairly simple reasons:  "Serial killers create better chronological narrative," and the structure lends itself to drama.

New Zealand's Stuff entertainment magazine profiled New Zealand crime fiction - after looking at the depth and talent of the country's writers, why aren't New Zealanders as supportive of their home-grown talent as readers in other countries? That's one reason Craig Sisterson set up the Ngaio Marsh Award in 2010 to celebrate Kiwi noir.

Terrence Rafferty's essay in The Atlantic made the case for women writing the best crime novels. He posits they don’t seem to believe in heroes as much as their male counterparts, which in some ways makes their storytelling a better fit for the times, with Gone Girl and Girl on a Train only scratching the top of the surface. "Their books are light on gunplay, heavy on emotional violence. Murder is de rigueur in the genre, so people die at the hands of others—lovers, neighbors, obsessive strangers—but the body counts tend to be on the low side."

Not to neglect the male half of the species, Lisa Levy wrote an profile of James Sallis for Lithub, an author she feels should be taking his rightful place alongside his American contemporary paranoids and peers, Don DeLillo (b.1936) and Thomas Pynchon (b. 1937).

A play by Henning Mankell about a Swedish couple struggling to understand the Africa where they have lived for more than a decade is being published in English for the first time in the new issue of Index on Censorship’s quarterly magazine. Best known for his crime novels about Inspector Wallander, Mankell was also a dramatist, with more than 30 plays to his name.  

Writing for The Strand Magazine, William Lashner listed "Ten Things to Learn from Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett."

Sherlock Holmes fans will appreciate an infographic about some of the surprisingly sophisticated scientific methods Holmes used to crack his cases.

The June issue of Yellow Mama features the hit man story "Flint Hills Express,” by Kenneth James Crist, a procedural from Tendai Huchu, “The Best One Can Do, Under the Circumstances,” and other new stories by Jim Wilsky, Ciro DiLorenzo, Richard Godwin, Dr. Mel Waldman, and Lee Todd Lacks. There's also new poetry from Phillip J. Ammonds, Marc Pietrzykowski, and Judith Partin-Nielsen.

The featured weekly crime poem at the 5-2 is "Obama Responsible for Flint: A Patriot News Television Exclusive" by Robert Cooperman.

In the Q&A roundup this week, the Mystery People were busy, busy people, lassoing Timothy Hallinan to discuss King Maybe, his latest novel featuring L.A. burlgar Junior Bender, as well as Lisa Sandlin chatting about new novel The Do-Right, and Laura Lippman talking about her latest, Wilde Lake; Omnimystery News welcomed authors Amy Metz (Rogues & Rascals in Goose Pimple Junction) and Jody Wenner (Painting the Lake); and Patti Abbott stopped by Dana King's blog to discuss her newest novel Shot in Detroit, from Polis Books.