Mystery Melange

On Saturday, during the inaugural Murder and Mayhem crime fiction conference in Chicago, organizers presented Sara Paretsky with the very first Sara Paretsky Award, designed to honor great crime fiction from the Midwest. Paretsky, the author of more than 20 books, is best known for her bestselling series featuring crime protagonist V. I. Warshawski, a Chicago private investigator.

The Portland, Oregon-based fan group Friends of Mystery announced that Seattle lawyer-turned-author Robert Dugoni won his first Spotted Owl Award for The 7th Canon. The Rap Sheet has a list of finalists for the award, which celebrates the "best mystery written by an author whose primary residence is in the Pacific Northwest."

The Lamba Literary Awards were announced yesterday by Lambda Literary, the nation’s oldest and largest literary arts organization advancing LGBTQ literature. You can check out all the lists via this link, including the nominees for Best Gay Mystery and Best Lesbian Mystery.

George Smiley is set to return in the new John le Carré novel, A Legacy of Spies. The 85-year-old author is bringing his most famous character in from the cold, 25 years after the debut espionage classic Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

Harlequin is launching Hanover Square Press, a new imprint led by editorial director Peter Joseph that will publish beginning in January 2018. Early acquisitions include Neil Olson's The Black Painting, a literary mystery involving a stolen work by the artist Francisco de Goya, and Red River, a debut thriller inspired in part by true crime programs such as Serial and Making a Murderer, by Daily Mail First Novel Competition winner Amy Lloyd. Future titles also include a thriller by Charles Rosenberg, who is a legal consultant for TV shows such as LA Law, Boston Legal and The Practice.

The Irish Independent's Tanya Sweeney surveyed how women are leading the charge in a male-dominated genre with "grip lit."

Pursuit Magazine profiled the daring life history of Stanley Weiss that almost sounds as if was lifted out of a spy thriller. Weiss was a mining magnate and foreign policy expert whose accidental friendship with double-agent Guy Burgess proved one of the most influential of his life.

Cuba’s top detective writer is virtually unknown in his home country, while detective fiction fans and literature buffs worldwide know and love Leonardo Padura, even watching his sleuth Mario Conde on Netflix. 

Lithub profiled Frédéric Dard, the "most prolific and widely read Francophone writer with whom hardly anybody in the English speaking world, even serious crime genre aficionados, is acquainted." Part of the problem may be that only a handful of his 300+ novels were ever translated into English.

These days, libraries not only celebrate books, but they often also offer a variety of other programs to support their communities and the arts. Coming up April 29 to June 2 in the UK, the Warrington borough’s libraries will profile classic American crime thrillers of the 1940s and 50s, such as The Maltese Falcon and Double Indemnity, with photographer Paul Jackson's exhibition of photographs inspired by the highly stylized black and white films as well as film screenings. Jackson's project has a bit of an interactive component, working with local models and makeup/hairdresser artists for the exhibition called Paint It Black.

Forensic science on television is often portrayed as almost instant magic, but real forensic scientists often do play the role of hero, as this recent story out of Tampa attests.

Speaking of forensics, was Jane Austin poisoned with arsenic? A lead curator of Modern Archives & Manuscripts at the British Library suggested as much in a blog post, but many scholars and medical experts say this theory is bunk, more crime fiction than plausible truth.

From California's John Steinbeck to Maine's Stephen King, here are the most famous authors from every state, including a few crime fiction writers.

This week's featured crime poem at the 5-2 is "The Pickpocket's Proclamation" by Natisha Parsons.

In the Q&A roundup, Omnimystery News welcomed author Nancy Boyarsky to talk about her new first in series mystery The Swap; Owen Laukkanen talked up crime, train-hopping and "forgotten girls" with the Houston Chronicle; and Deborah Kalb chatted with Denmark's "Queen of Crime," Sara Blaedel, author of the new mystery novel The Lost Woman, the latest in her Detective Louise Rick series.

Comments

[Art Taylor]

Always love your round-ups of news. Great stuff!

[BV Lawson]

Thanks, Art! Any time you find something you think is newsworthy, please feel to pass it along. :-)