Scottish crime fiction author Val McDermid is participating in an unusual New Year's project: A specially-commissioned short story by McDermid will be projected onto sites around Edinburgh from New Year’s Day until Burns’ Night (January 25), encouraging locals and visitors to take part in a walking tour through the city's historic streets. Scotland’s Queen of Crime also hopes her story, "New Year’s Resurrection," will resuscitate the popularity of a forgotten 19th Century Scottish novelist, Susan Ferrier, who once outsold Jane Austen and is a central part of Val's story.
Merle Nygate has won the inaugural Little, Brown Award for crime fiction at the University of East Anglia (UEA), receiving £3,000 for her unpublished espionage novel, A Righteous Spy. Henry Sutton, course director for the Crime MA at UEA, added: "The Crime MA seeks to push boundaries and grab attention for the excellence and ambition of the work being produced. We are hugely grateful for the support and recognition from Little, Brown." Nygate graduated this year as part of the university's first cohort on the two-year, part time MA, which launched in September 2015.
The seminar "Agatha Christie and the Golden Age of Detective Fiction" will be held at Chicago's Newberry Library on April 14, 2018. Taught by Northwestern University's Elzbieta Foeller-Pituch, it will "discuss representative works of the 1920s and '30s featuring [Christie's] major sleuths, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple" and ways that Christie handles the conventions of the mystery genre. The works listed for discussion are Murder on the Orient Express, Philomel Cottage, and The Thirteen Problems. (HT to Elizabeth Foxwell)
Lee Child, author chair for the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate, revealed that "New York King of Crime" Don Winslow has been named the first headliner and "special guest" for the 2018 event, to be held July 19-22.
More end of the year "best book" lists have been announced, including Lithub's "Best Crime Books of 2017" and The Strand Magazine's "Top 25 Best Book of 2017."
The Pilot, in conjunction with WRAL-TV and the N.C. Humanities Council, will be hosting a special event Feb. 23 at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh, featuring acclaimed authors John Grisham and John Hart. "Thrillers! An Evening with Authors John Grisham and John Hart" will be moderated by D.G. Martin, host of UNC-TV’s "North Carolina Bookwatch" with proceeds benefiting the nonprofit Friends of the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences in support of dinosaur research and education at the museum.
We say farewell to two author group blogs: Hey, There’s a Dead Guy in the Living Room, is shutting down after a decade in the business, and The Lady Killers, which has been around since 2006, is also bidding the blogosphere farewell.
Fortunately, there are sill several good crime fiction blogs out there as Feedspot recently noted - and I'm honored to be there on the list along with The Rap Sheet and many more (although this is hardly an exhaustive list as it exludes fine blogs like Mystery Fanfare and is tied only to those blogs using the service).
As I noted on a blog post the other day, crime fiction fans were devastated to hear of the news of autho Sue Grafton's passing. But in honor of her popular book series featuring Kinsey Millhone, Criminal Element has posted a poll where readers can vote on their favorite Grafton "Alphabet" mystery.
We also say farewell to author Marian Babson, who passed away at the age of 88 in December. She was born in Massachusetts but spent most of her life in the UK and published close to fifty humorous, cozy mysteries. In 1996 she was awarded the Crime Writers' Association Dagger in the Library award for her body of work. (HT to the Femmes Fatales.)
Mystery Readers Journal, which is going into its 34th year of publication, has a special offer for you: Subscribe by January 15, 2018 and receive a bonus issue.
The Daily Mail profiled five female writers in the UK who are making a killing in the crime fiction world.
The Bangor Public Library posted a listing of its 10 most-checked-out books of 2017, and it turns all of them were crime fiction titles.
Much has been reported about the severe backlog in DNA testing and rape kits, and in Michigan's Wayne County, Prosecutor Kym Worthy has spent years processing 11,341 rape kits found forgotten in a police storage warehouse where they were routinely dumped without investigation. She's since found over 800 serial rapists, criminals who have struck 10-15 times without being stopped.
This week's crime poem at the 5-2 is "Why I Love Being a Cop" by Andrew Kuhn.
In the Q&A roundup, the LA Review of Books chatted with Nelson George, who has produced over 20 books and 15 films in addition to long stints with Billboard magazine and the Village Voice, about his three crime-fiction novels featuring D Hunter, a bodyguard turned investigator; Oline H. Cogdill interviewed Tom Straw for Mystery Scene Magazine - Straw is the author behind the Richard Castle tie-in books from the TV series; James Lee Burke spoke with the Tampa Bay Times about the return of Dave Robicheaux, with the first novel in that series to be published since 2012 due out in early January; and Alison Gaylin spoke with Mystery People contributor, Matthew Turbeville about Gaylin's writing process and her two recent books, What Remains of Me and If I Die Tonight.
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