The recently announced British Book Awards included a win for The Dry by Jane Harper in the Crime and Thriller category. The winner of the Best Fiction award went to Jon McGregor for Reservoir 13, about the aftershocks of a girl's disappearance in an English village.
The Short Mystery Fiction Society announced this year's winners of the Derringer Awards for short crime fiction. Best Flash Story was "Fishing for an Alibi" by Earl Staggs (Flash Bang Mysteries); Best Short Story was "The Cop Who Liked Gilbert and Sullivan" by Robert Lopresti (Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine #23); Best Long Story was "Death in the Serengeti" by David H. Hendrickson (Fiction River: Pulse Pounders: Andrenaline); and Best Novelette was "Flowing Waters" by Brendan DuBois (Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine). Read the lists of all the finalists in the various categories here.
The International Association of Media Tie-in Writers' announced their annual Scribe Award Nominees. Included among the books of interest to crime fiction fans are Don Pendleton’s The Executioner: Fatal Prescription, by Michael A. Black; The Will to Kill, by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins; and Robert B. Parker’s The Hangman’s Sonnet, by Reed Farrel Coleman (Putnam). Winners of all the 2018 Scribe Awards will be declared during this year’s San Diego Comic-Con International, July 19-22. (HT to the Rap Sheet)
A new festival is headed to Cardiff, Wales on June 1-2. The Crime and Coffee festival is the first such event to be held in Wales and will include panels, workshops, and readings with such authors as Belinda Bauer, Christopher Fowler, Rebecca Tope, Kate Hamer, Mark Ellis, Katherine Stansfield and many more.
The Southbank Centre has scheduled a special event featuring internationally best-selling authors Lee Child (Jack Reacher novels) and Ian Rankin (Inspector Rebus) in conversation as they consider the art of creating suspense and discuss the real world that their novels reflect. Although the event won't take place until November 15 at the Southbank Center's Queen Elizabeth Hall in the UK, tickets have already gone on sale.
Book publisher, editor and bookstore owner Otto Penzler has started another new initiative, Penzler Publishers, which will release its first six books this fall under the American Mystery Classics imprint. The imprint will focus on traditional mystery stories from the "golden age of detective fiction," to be released in both hardcover and trade paperback but not as e-books. Penzler said his inspiration to launch the imprint by the fact that British publishers have been successfully releasing mystery reprints from this time period but none so far in the U.S. Instead of hardboiled titles like Vintage, the imprint will focus on authors such as Ellery Queen and Mary Roberts Rinehart with the goal toward releasing 24 books annually by 2020.
The Lawrence Library in Pepperell, MA, is hosting the exhibit "Mysteries Revealed Book Illustration: Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys," through June 8. The exhibition of original cover art and first editions of both children's series is drawn from a collection by Jim McNamara, who owns nearly 4,000 Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books from the 1920s to now and written in several languages. He also collects memorabilia and cover artwork from each decade, dating back to the 1950s. (HT to Elizabeth Foxwell at the Bunburyist)
NoirCon, which cancelled this year's event due to the death of co-founder, Deen Kogan, has launched a new online journal, Retreats from Oblivion. NoirCon is a biennial conference devoted to noir and its creative expressions, and the journal will spotlight newly published work as well as highlights from past NoirCon catalogs. Offerings will include short stories, critical essays (not single-title reviews), poems, photographs, comics, artwork, interviews, songs, and much more. First up is the story "Easy Go" by Rick Ollerman.
In honor of the 10th anniversary of CrimeFest this year, organizers tapped Martin Edwards and Adrian Muller to edit an anthology of short crime fiction titled Ten Year Stretch. The work includes stories by Bill Beverly, Simon Brett, Lee Child, Ann Cleves, Jeffrey Deaver, Martin Edwards, Kate Ellis, Peter Guttridge, Sophie Hannah, John Harvey, Mick Herron, Donna Moore, Caro Ramsay, Ian Rankin, James Sallis, Zoë Sharp, Yrsa Sigurdardottir, Maj Sjöwall, Michael Stanley, and Andrew Taylor. All royalties from this collection go to the Royal National Institute for the Blind.
Murder on the Beach mystery bookstore in Delray Beach, Fla., was part of a feature by Atlas Obscura of "62 of the World's Best Independent Bookstores" as recommended by the Atlas Obscure readers. To celebrate that honor, Boca Magazine also featured a Q&A with bookstore owner Joanne Sinchuk. To see more of the indie bookstores named in the article - and whether your favorite was included - follow this link.
A possible plot for your next thriller - or maybe, it's more like your next sci-fi novel, depending upon your viewpoint. A prominent geneticist, who helped pioneer the use of the Crispr technique, said recently that criminals could alter their DNA to evade justice with new genetic editing tools. Not so fast, says Dr. Caitlin Curtis, a geneticist who studies privacy and data protection issues.
Speaking of thrillers, at least of the spy variety, Newsweek reported on a recently-outed spy whose name was included in the release from the National Archives of thousands of documents pertaining to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Not only is the spy still alive, he is a former editor at the Agence France-Presse and was friends (or frenemies) with Richard Wright, the acclaimed author of Native Son and Black Boy, and Chester Himes, the ex-convict turned author of hard-boiled detective fiction.
You probably don't give your fingerprints much thought. But Chantel Tattoli, writing for the Paris Review, invites you to take a look at "The Surprising History (and Future) of Fingerprints."
The latest poem at the 5-2 crime poetry weekly is "Northern Bride" by Colin James.
In the Q&A roundup, Rob Hart interviewed fellow author Owen Laukkanen for Lit Reactor, talking about boats, trains, dogs, and his latest novel, Gale Force. Lit Reactor also featured an interview with Jeffery Hess about Tushhog, a follow-up to his 2016 debut novel Beachhead; Crime Fiction Lover's Catherine Turnbull chatted with Isbelle Grey, a prolific writer with a series featuring detective Grace Fisher, as well as standalone psychological thrillers and television writing credits that include over 35 episodes of series such as Midsomer Murders; and Alex Segura was snagged by the Mystery People to discuss Blackout, his latest book to feature private eye Pete Fernandez.
Comments