Mystery Melange

The Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival has announced its 2017 line-up that will mark the 15th annual celebration of the genre. The Special Guests announced to date are "titans of the genre" Lee Child, Ian Rankin, Peter May, Stuart MacBride, and Kathy Reichs. Last year's successful event sold-out with 14,000 individual tickets over four days, so you might want to nail down your tickets now.

The upcoming conference Agatha Christie: A Reappraisal has issued a call for papers on the topic. The two day conference will take place June 19-20 at Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge, with keynote speakers Julius Green, author of Curtain Up: Agatha Christie: A Life in Theatre, and Merja Makinen, author of Agatha Christie: Investigating Femininity. For more details and a list of possible themes, check out this posting from Shots Magazine.

The Detection Club, Britain’s oldest club for crime writers, has honored award-winning Chichester crime writer Peter Lovesey with an 80th birthday tribute, a collection of short stories by its members. The book, Motives for Murder, was edited by Martin Edwards and comes with a foreword by Len Deighton. 

Speaking of short stories, Transworld is publishing a collection of Jack Reacher short stories in June 2017, set to be the first time all Lee Child's shorter fiction featuring Jack Reacher have been collected into one volume.

Scottish crime author Denise Mina undertook her own investigation into the tragic story behind a pensioner who lay undiscovered for years after dying alone. The man's story became national symbol of social isolation.

By rights, author Ian Rankin should have been an accountant, and if not for a poor exam performance and giving up on a PhD, we might never have had Inspector Rebus.

John Clarkson is the author of several thrillers and crime novels who applied the Page 69 Test to his latest novel, Bronx Requiem.

Agatha Christie was also an inveterate traveler, visiting countries in nearly every continent on the map, from the Canary Islands to New Zealand, and found inspiration for some of her most famous novels abroad. If you’re looking to travel in Christie's shoes, you have plenty of options all over the world, as this rundown from Book Riot attests.

Crime writer Ian Rankin is set to appear in the BBC spoof police show Scot Squad in a cameo playing himself. Scot Squad sends up "Scotland’s first united police force" as it follows a "new brand of Bravehearts, there to protect and serve."

This week's crime poem at the 5-2 is "Poisoned" by Daniel D'Arezzo, and this month's featured pulp story over at Beat to a Pulp is "Labor Pains" by Scott Adlerberg.

In the Q&A roundup, Debbie De Louise stopped by Omnimystery News today to chat about the second mystery in her Cobble Cove series, Between a Rock and a Hard Place; Ryan Bracha took Paul D. Brazill's "Short, Sharp Interview" challenge; and The Writers Life blog welcomed Malia Zaidi to discuss the latest book in her Lady Evelyn mysteries series, A Darker Shore.