Mystery Melange

The new year brings a slate of recurring crime fiction festivals and conferences you can start planning for now, including this list from Crime Fiction Ireland for events across The Pond, this listing from Sisters in Crime, and I've also been updating the Upcoming Conference listing in the upper right sidebar on this blog.

Looking ahead to June, The Guardian's series of writing workshops continues with "Writing authentic crime fiction: A Masterclass with forensic pathologists, criminal lawyers and frontline police."  Participants will be able to learn how to craft a killer story for film, fiction, or TV with bestselling author Erin Kelly, Silent Witness consultant Dr Stuart Hamilton, former chief superintendent Graham Bartlett, and other experts from the world of crime.

The Captivating Criminality Network will hold its fourth UK conference June 29 - July 1st at Bath Spa University in the UK. The theme is "Crime Fiction: Detection, Public and Private, Past and Present," and conference organizers have issued a call for papers on the subject. (HT to Ayo Ontade at Shots Magazine.)

Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine published their first issue of the new year, which celebrates both the holiday season and Sherlock Holmes (EQMM recently announced they would be publishing fewer issues, six per year, but each will now be a double issue of stories). You can also read more story-behind-the-story tidbits and news via the EQMM blog Something is Going to Happen, or follow the magazine on Facebook.

Speaking of short crime fiction, there's good news and bad news in the world of short mystery publications, as Sandra Seamans noted on her blog with a list of markets that have gone under during the past year, as well as some new kids on the block. It's particularly brutal to lose such outstanding zines as ThugLit, Crime Factory, The Big Click, Shock Totem, and Noir Nation, but we have hopes that some may find new lives eventually (as sometimes happens in the publishing world). Case in point, Pulp Modern, as I mentioned last week, may be rising from the grave.

Janet Rudolph, editor of Mystery Readers Journal, has issued a call for reviews, articles, and Author! Author! essays on the topic of Midwest Mysteries. For more details, check out the notice on the Mystery Fanfare blog.

It's well-known to many Agatha Christie fans that the author was interested in archaeology, thanks in no small part to her second husband, Max Mallowan. But both Christie and Mallowan would be horrified to learn that a lot of the work they did in Nimrud, Iraq, was recently blown to bits by ISIS. As their grandson notes, "If my grandparents could somehow be alive again and see the newspapers for a week, they would not have recognized the places where they had been and lived and worked."

In what may be a first such incident in law enforcement, police in Arkansas have asked Amazon for recordings potentially made by an Echo device ("Alexa")  in connection with a murder investigation. Police haven't specified the type of data they expect to find on the device, and it's not clear what the device could have captured that would have been relevant to the case. But such new technology opens up a new can of worms for the legal field to fish through, both in terms of crime investigations and privacy.

The Books in My Life blog profiled the "great (and relatively unknown) short crime fiction of Fredric Brown."

Criminal Element also had a fun look at "Lisbeth Salander’s Assassin’s Guide to New Year’s Resolutions."

This is a cool idea: Vancouver libraries established a writer-in-residence program which has most recently featured crime author Sam Wiebe.

In January 1917, Gordon Mace registered a homestead patent for the Baldpate Inn, a bed-and-breakfast near Estes Park inspired by the mystery novel Seven Keys to Baldpate by Earl Derr Biggers. In keeping with the book’s theme, he and his family gave each of their guests a key to keep but visitors began donating keys instead. A century later, the inn houses a collection of about 30,000 keys, each with its own story to tell.

Maybe Benedict Cumberbatch playing Sherlock Holmes wasn't such a stretch after all; the actor and Sherlock creator Arthur Conan Doyle are actually 16th cousins, twice removed – both descended from John of Gaunt, who died in 1399.

The featured crime poem at the 5-2 this week is "Sweet Sixteen" by C.J. Edwards.

In the Q&A roundup, E.B. Davis interviewed author Mary Miley for the Writers Who Kill blog, discussing Miley's 1920s Hollywood mystery series; and the Mystery People chatted with Tom Franklin about editing the anthology Mississippi Noir, released as part of the Akashic Noir series.