The Mystery Writers of America noted the loss of Jane Langton, a 2017 MWA Grand Master, who passed away on December 22, 2018 at the age of 95. In a writing career that spanned over four decades, Langton wrote and illustrated multiple mystery series for children and also penned adult mysteries including Emily Dickinson is Dead, which was an Edgar nominee and received a Nero Wolfe award. In addition to her Grand Master status, Langton was also winner of the Bouchercon Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000.
There's a new crime fiction event in the UK next spring. Book Lovers' Supper Club has announced the first Leonardslee Crime Festival celebrating the best of crime writing in the south-east of England, which will be held March 2-3. The Crime Festival will open with a whodunnit Murder Mystery afternoon tea presented by the Killer Women, featuring crime writers presenting an hour-long puzzle for the audience to solve. Melanie Whitehouse, founder of The Book Lovers' Supper Club, added that “Misleading everyone will be authors Elly Griffiths, Colette McBeth, Mel McGrath and Julia Crouch, plus top cop Graham Bartlett."
2018 has seen the rise of the niche independent bookstore including Knights Of, the publisher of minority-centered books that opened a pop-up bookstore which sold out of all its stock in a matter of days, and Troubador (who run self-publishing imprint Matador) and their Festival Bookshop housed in the back of a repurposed van. It only stocks Matador titles, and will tour festivals in the UK throughout the summer. Meanwhile, independent bookstore sales in the U.S. rose by 5% in 2018, according to the American Booksellers Association.
Shelf Awareness, an online organization focused on publishing industry news and trends, also has a newsletter for readers with book reviews, author interviews, quizzes, and more. Right now, they have a giveaway that also supports indie bookstores; if you signup for their twice-weekly reader newsletter, you'll be entered to win a $500 gift card to the indie bookstore of your choice.
Happy 20th anniversary to the world's first spy museum, which opened its doors in Tampere, Finland in 1998 with a vast collection of original and functional artifacts and documentation ranging from the First World War through the end of the Cold War. A sister museum opened in Washington, D.C., two years later, and the most recent member of the "family," the KGB Spy Museum in New York City, just recently opened its doors to the public.
There has been a big push for diversity in crime fiction lately, including Polis Books founder Jason Pinter launching Agora Books, a diversity-focused imprint. Writing for the Canada-based Quill & Quire, Wayne Arthurson focused on how white voices overwhelm Indigenous crime fiction, while author Sam Wiebe (who was the subject of an Author R&R a while back) urged his crime fiction colleagues and the genre at large to reckon with inclusion.
Hat tip to Elizabeth Foxwell for noting the Digital Cartographies of Spanish Detective Fiction at Grinnell College where assistant professor of Spanish Nick Phillips and undergraduate student Margaret Giles have created visual representations of investigations in Spanish detective fiction via the mapmaking program Carto. Authors covered include Carme Riera, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Juan José Millás, and Julio Muñoz Gijón.
Fun for book geeks: the New York Public LIbrary posted an (extremely unscientific) online quiz to determine which of Dewey Decimal System heading you fall under. Are you a 060, a lover of rules and guidelines? Are you an 818 joker? How about an 031 perfectionist or maybe a 629.8, possibly a robot?
The latest poem at the 5-2 crime poetry weekly is "Very Secret Santa" by John Kaprielian.
Writing for the LA Review of Books, Robert Allen Papinchak profiled Golden Age author Dorothy B. Hughes’s debut hard-boiled novel, The So Blue Marble (first published in 1940), which is being reissued by Penzler Press as the first in a series of American Mystery Classics.
In the Q&A roundup, Scottish crime author Ian Rankin is the latest "By the Book" interviewee at the New York Times; the LA Review of Books spoke with Erica Wright about The Blue Kingfisher, her latest novel featuring Kathleen Stone, a former NYPD undercover officer turned private investigator; and Irish author Tana French, best known for her Dublin Murder Squad series, also chatted with the LA Review of Books, discussing her latest work, a standalone psychological thriller, The Witch Elm.
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