Mystery Melange

The Bouchercon Board of Directors announced that Otto Penzler is the recipient of its 2016 David Thompson Special Service Award for "extraordinary efforts to develop and promote the crime fiction field." Penzler is the proprietor of New York City’s The Mysterious Bookshop, the founder of The Mysterious Press (1975), and has edited numerous anthologies. He also published The Armchair Detective, a quarterly journal devoted to the study of mystery and suspense fiction, in addition to many other contributions to the crime fiction genre. (HT to Mystery Fanfare.)

Foreword Reviews announced the IndieFab Award winners for 2016, including those in the Mystery and Thriller/Suspense categories. For both winners and finalists, check out the official IndieFab link.

The Ngaio Marsh Awards and Reykjavik City Library are offering booklovers a special Ngaio Marsh Awards edition on June 30 of the Library's popular "Dark Deeds" summer walking tours. The walks are centered on dark deeds of various kinds in Icelandic fiction, happening in or around Reykjavík, and give a taste of Icelandic crime fiction, ghost stories and history.

Crime Fiction Lover decided it was time to celebrate UK crime fiction rather than add to the Brexit debate with a listing of "12 Great British Cities, 12 Great British Novels."

Barry Forshaw penned an essay for The Independent adding more fuel to the literary fires that have burned lately for the feminine side of crime fiction. The piece, titled "Are we in a new Golden Age of women crime writers? The five new crime novels you must read," takes a closer look at novels by Ruth Ware, Megan Abbott, Sharon Bolton, Cecilia Ekbäck, and Helen Callaghan.

The New Yorker profiled James Renner’s book True Crime Addict: How I Lost Myself in the Mysterious Disappearance of Maura Murray and tackled the "serious problem" of internet sleuths, with a profile of amateur efforts at investigating crime, from Truman Capote to the podcast Serial. The essay noted that many such efforts are drawn to the most dramatic possibilities and ignore more tedious solutions.

Another New Yorker piece reviewed The Annals of Murder, a new reference work they called an "indispensable guide to early American murder," with its inventory of more than two hundred years of homicide. Reference lovers will appreciate "the bibliographies of all the pardon-seeking confessions, moralizing execution sermons, self-justifying stories crafted by law enforcement, tell-alls seeking pardons for the accused, and salacious trial transcripts revised and revisited by printers across multiple editions."

In a Q&A for Electric Literature, authors Emelie Schepp and Joakim Zander talked about what it means to be part of the "Nordic noir" literary legacy of Sjöwall, Mankell, and Larsson, about their writing influences, and about how they weave issues of immigration, refugees, ISIS, poverty and radicalization into the contemporary nordic landscape.

Barnes & Noble is betting on physical bookstores to improve profits and boost its bottom line, with a twist: it's opening new stores with cafés that serve beer and wine. Of the company’s four new prototype stores, the first will open in Eastchester, N.Y., in October with additional concept stores, whose footprint will be about 20%–25% smaller than a typical B&N superstore, planned for Edina, Minnesota, Folsom, California, and Loudon County in Virginia.

The Bookshy Books blog compiled "Six More Crime Novels by African Women Writers to Add to Your List."

Thomas O’Malley and Douglas Graham Purdy created a list of  "Top Boston crime novels" for The Strand Magazine.

Apparently, a Taylor Swift-themed graphic novella mystery is in the works, thanks to a Kickstarter campaign. The story is being penned by Larissa Zageris, with illustrations by Kitty Curran, and is envisioned as a modern-day Nancy Drew project.

The new weekly crime poem at the 5-2 is "Big Brother is Still Watching You" by Tonia Kalouria, and the latest monthly story at Beat to a Pulp is "Neighbors" by Mel Odom.

In the Q&A roundup, Omnimystery News welcomed Andrez Bergen to talk about his new crime noir, Black Sails, Disco Inferno; Criminal Element held a Q&A with Spencer Kope, author of Collecting the Dead; and Catherine Bruns stopped by Writers Who Kill to discuss her series with real estate agent Cindy York.