Mystery Melange

Sisters in Crime announced the winner of the Eleanor Taylor Bland Crime Fiction Writers of Color Award for 2016 is Stephane Dunn. Dunn is a writer and professor at Morehouse College where she directs the Cinema, Television, & Emerging Media Studies program (CTEMS) as well as teaching courses in film, creative writing, popular culture, and literature.

If you're a Margaret Margon fan, check out  the Wake County Public Libraries two-month program "Close to Home: Celebrating Margaret Maron’s North Carolina," which begins this Sunday, September 11 with a kick-off event.  More than 90 additional programs are scheduled at six branches of the library system as part of the celebration. (HT to Art Taylor.)

On September 13, authors John Connolly, Declan Hughes and Stuart Neville will be taking part in the New York launch of the academic collection of essays The Contemporary Irish Detective Novel. Edited by Elizabeth Mannion, The Contemporary Irish Detective Novel considers the detective genre’s position in Irish Studies and the standing of Irish authors within the detective novel tradition. Besides Connolly, Hughes and Nevile, it explores the work of Peter Tremayne, Ken Bruen, John Banville (as Benjamin Black), Brian McGilloway, Tana French and Jane Casey. The free event is begins at 7 pm in the Glucksman Ireland House at New York University.  

The second annual Murder by the Book, a mystery festival for readers and writers, will fly into the Jesup Memorial Library in Bar Harbor, Maine, on Friday, September 30 and Saturday, October 1.  Participating writers confirmed to date include Hank Phillippi Ryan, Julia Spencer-Fleming, Dorothy Cannell, Gayle Lynds, Kate Flora, Bruce Coffin, Vaughn Hardacker, Chris Holm, Maureen Milliken, Lynne Raimondo, Roger Guay, John Sheldon, Brendan Rielly, Katherine Hall Page and Lea Wait.

On Saturday, October 8th, the Mysterium conference will feature a day of mystery, workshops, and intrigue, with special guest Laura Lippman and three dozen other mystery authors. The one-day event takes place at Wesleyan University in Middletown CT, with registration required.

Hard Case Crime has dug up a James Bond novel Donald Westlake wrote as a treatment several years ago that was part of a project to develop a story to follow-up Goldeneye. Best known for his Parker books (under his pseudonym of Richard Stark), Westlake also worked as a screenwriter off and on and even received an Oscar nomination for the 1990’s-era The Grifters. Now Hard Case Crime has resurrected this lost spy story, which Westlake rewrote as a novel titled Forever And A Death, with plans to publish the work next June.

Mystery Readers Journal editor Janet Rudolph posted that the response to the call for articles for an issue on small town cops was so overwhelming, they've decided to split the themed issue into two. But there's still time to write an author essay for Mystery Readers Journal: Small Town Cops II, if you send it along by October 15 to [email protected]. Janet is also seeking essays for the 2017 themed issues, Midwest Mysteries; Murder in Wartime, and possibly Big City Cops.

The ACLA conference has put out a call for papers for the upcoming seminar in Utrecht from July 6-9, 2017, titled "Worlding Crime Fiction: From the National to the Global." (HT to Shots)

First Monday returns October 3rd to the City University of London with a top notch foursome of crime authors including SJ Watson, (Before I Go To Sleep), Stuart Neville, (the Serena Flanagan series), Antonia Hodgson (A Death at Fountains Abbey), and William Ryan (The Constant Soldier).  Karen Robinson, editor of the Sunday Times Crime Club. will serve as moderator.  

London is also the place to be on Tuesday, October 11 at Heffers Bookshop for a panel on Agatha Christie. Featured participants include Sophie Hannah, who was hired by the Christie Estate to pen new Hercule Poirot novels; John Curran, editor of the official Agatha Christie newsletter and driving force behind the Agatha Christie Archive; and Julius Green, the founder of The Agatha Christie Theatre Company, which celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2015. Tickets will be available at the door. (HT to Ayo Onatade at Shots.)

The New York Chapter of Mystery Writers of America will hold an evening of crime featuring readings by its members. President Laura K. Curtis will be moderating the event, which is free and open to public and begins at 6:30 p.m. on October 18  at the KGB Bar, 85 East 4th Street, New York.

The Red Line Book Festival and New Island Books are hosting an evening of crime writing on October 12th in Tallaght, featuring four leading Irish crime authors. Declan Burke will chair the event at the Civic Theatre at 8 pm with Alan Glynn, Declan Hughes and Alex Barclay, discussing the crime-writing process, gripping plots and characters, and Irish crime fiction past and present.

Writing for The Guardian, Jonathan Coe took a look at "Whodunnit and whowroteit: the strange case of The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor," which chronicles the real mystery of this 1930s cult thriller - not its murder, but the identity of its writer.

The literary journal Books From Finland profiled an author not well known outside his native country, Matti Yrjänä Joensuu (born 1948), a policeman by profession, who won the Nordic Crime Novel Competition in 1976 and began a realistic crime and police novel in the style of the Swedish writers Sjöwall and Wahlöö. He is the only crime writer to have received a government literature prize and was on the shortlist for the new Finlandia Prize, Finland’s equivalent of the Booker, in 1985.

A new Pew study showed that some 65% of adult Americans have read a print book in the last year while just 28% had read an e-book. All told, 73% of respondents had read a book in some form, whether printed or digital, during that time frame. Among other findings: about 40% of respondents read only print books, while 6% read e-books exclusively, and 14% had listened to an audiobook. But Nate Hoffelder of The Digital Reader takes exception to the structure of the survey, feeling that how readers consume the various genres and categories is even more important.

In 1971, Max Collins was a student in the University of Iowa’s Writers' Workshop where his thesis project was to develop three novels that demonstrated that crime fiction could be written using a common Midwestern small town. One of them featured a hitman named Quarry, and Collins went on to publish three Quarry novels in 1976, 1977, and 1987. Twenty years later the character was revived by Hard Case Crime and now Titan Comics is set to publish a comic book mini-series based on those novels.

Meanwhile, Silvertail Books is set to bring four classic military thrillers by Mike Lunnon-Wood back into print. Published collectively as The British Military Quartet, the titles are: Long Reach, King’s Shilling, Let Not the Deep, and Congo Blue, which was previously published as Heraklion Blue. Silvertail publisher Humfrey Hunter added: "Mike Lunnon-Wood’s books are truly great thrillers. They are gripping stories full of authenticity but, best of all, they are object lessons in how to write characters into a kind of fiction which depends as much on its portrayal of people as that of sophisticated details."

A New York Times investigative report took a look at a small Indiana county with a disturbing claim to fame: it sends more people to prison than San Francisco and Durham, North Carolina, combined.

One of the big news stories in publishing recently has been Pride and Prejudice and Zombies author Seth Grahame-Smith being sued by his publisher to return his advance. But as The Guardian notes, from Julian Assange to Amy Schumer, Grahame-Smith isn't alone.

Fans of the legendary spy thriller author John le Carré will want to check out The Guardian's exclusive extract from his new memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel.

Bookweb had a warm fuzzy piece about warm fuzzy bookstore companions, from cats to dogs to guines pigs, birds, and potbellied pigs (and even some chickens, ferrets, and chinchillas, for good measure).

It really does pay to be a librarian: for nearly 50 years, Robert Morin worked quietly at the library of the University of New Hampshire until he quitely passed away a little over a year ago at the age of 77. But then, to the surprise of many, Morin left a small fortune to his employer and alma mater — $4 million.

The featured crime poem at the 5-2 this week is "Trump's Sacrifice" by Robert Cooperman.

In the Q&A roundup, Rosemary and Larry Wild stopped by Omnimystery News to talk aobut the third mystery in their Dan and Rivka Sherman series, Death Steals a Holy Book; author John Gilstrap spoke with The Washington Post about what makes a thriller; the winner of Best Crime Novel at The Irish Book Awards, Alex Barclay, talked with Sophie Grenham about the magic of West Cork, iconic FBI agents, and how great crime fiction should always have one extra twist; The Missourian had an extensive profile and Q&A with James Lee Burke, who reflected on his life and work including The Jealous Kind, the end-cap to the Holland trilogy set in the 1950s; and Ominimystery News welcomed Shannon Baker to chat about her new mystery series that starts off with Stripped Bare.