Mystery Melange, Thanksgiving Edition

MWA announced the 2018 Grand Master, Raven, and Ellery Queen Award recipients:  Jane Langton, William Link, and Peter Lovesey have been chosen as the 2018 Grand Masters by Mystery Writers of America (MWA) - the award represents the pinnacle of achievement in mystery writing and was established to acknowledge important contributions to this genre, as well as for a body of work that is both significant and of consistent high quality; the Raven Award for outstanding achievement in the mystery field outside the realm of creative writing will be given to The Raven Bookstore and Kristopher Zgorski, founder of the founder of the crime fiction review blog BOLO Books; and the The Ellery Queen Award that honors “outstanding writing teams and outstanding people in the mystery-publishing industry,” will be given to publisher/editor/translator Robert Pépin.

Author Michael Redhill has won the Scotiabank Giller Prize for the best in Canadian fiction for his novel Bellevue Square. The thriller about a woman on the hunt for her doppelganger was praised Monday by jury members for its “complex literary wonders.”  Past winners of the 100,000 Canadian dollar ($78,000 U.S.) Giller prize have included Margaret Atwood, Mordecai Richler and Alice Munro. The Giller was created in 1994 by businessman Jack Rabinovitch in memory of his late wife, literary journalist Doris Giller. 

While you're waiting for family to arrive for Thanksgiving, why not check out of the Thanksgiving-themed crime fiction titles on this list, courtesy of Mystery Fanfare.

Vice offered up its thanks for "Agatha Christie, Murder-Mystery Pioneer and the Original Gone Girl."

Courtesy of the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine blog, here's a short short by the late Edward D. Hoch titled "The Thanksgiving Chicken."

The Mystery Lovers Kitchen has several holiday recipes worth checking out, such as this Butternut Squash Quinoa Salad and Maple-Glazed Roasted Acorn Squash with Toasted Pumpkin Seeds.

Apparently, crime fiction books can make excellent travel guides

I always give thanks for libraries, and here's more proof that librarians are heroes and have been for some time: In the 1930s, many people living in isolated communities had very little access to jobs, let alone a good education for their children. In Kentucky, they had isolated mountain communities which could only get their books and reading material from one source… librarians on horseback, part of President Franklin Roosevelt WPA initiative. (HT to Mystery Fanfare)

The Daily Mail took a peek inside Australia's only "body farm," the secret bush site in Sydney where corpses are left to decompose to help police solve murders - and 500 donors are waiting to get in.

This week's crime poem at the 5-2 is "Cruel Poetry" by Charles Rammelkamp.

In the abbreviated Q&A roundup, Nick Triplow took Paul D. Brazill's "Short, Sharp Interview" challenge on the eve of the launch of Getting Carter: Ted Lewis and the Birth of Brit Noir, Triplow's book about the life and work of the author best known for his novel Jack’s Return Home, adapted as Get Carter in 1971.