The winners of the Ngaio Marsh Awards, which celebrate the best of New Zealand crime, mystery, thriller, and suspense writing, have been announced: Best Novel went to This Mortal Boy by Fiona Kidman; Best First Novel was won by Call Me Evie by JP Pomare; and Best Non-Fiction went to The Short Life and Mysterious Death of Jane Furlong by Kelly Dennett. Check out all the other finalists here.
The UK Kindle Storyteller Award shortlist was revealed and includes the crime novels, I Have Sinned by Caimh McDonnell; Tragedy at Piddleton Hotel by Emily Organ; and The Picture On The Fridge by Ian W Sainsbury. The UK Kindle Storyteller Award recognizes newly published work in the English language across any genre and was open to all authors who published their book through Kindle Direct Publishing on Amazon.co.uk between May 1 and August 31 2019. The winner will be announced by at a ceremony in London in October, and awarded the cash prize, a marketing campaign to support the book on Amazon.co.uk, and the opportunity to have their book translated.
The York Literature Festival in the UK starts off its series of events tonight with international best-selling author Peter Robinson as he launches Many Rivers to Cross, the 26th instalment of the DCI Banks series. Other upcoming events will include Mischa Glenny, creator of the hit BBC series, McMafia, on October 7; and Poirot actor David Suchet on October 10 "behind the lens," showcasing his wonderfully evocative photographs with commentary.
The Terror Australis Readers and Writers Festival is Tasmania’s newest biennial literary festival, and this year's theme is "Murder She Wrote," inspired by Agatha Christie, the Queen of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. Murder She Wrote will begin on Halloween this year and run for four days from Thursday October 31 to Sunday November 3, followed by two days of a food and wine trail, the "Trail of Writers’ Tears." The four-day book spree includes Masterclasses, Workshops, incisive literary discussions and a Murder Mystery Party set in 1920s’ Cairo.
On Sunday, November 10, the 6th Annual Ladies of Intrigue returns to the Mesa Verde Country Club, at Costa Mesa, California. This year's headliners include J.A. Janice and Laurie King, with panelists to include Barbara DeMarco Barrett, Greta Boris, Steph Cha, Mary Anna Evans, Rachel Howzell Hall, Kaira Rouda, Laurie Stevens, Betty Webb, and others TBA. Register at ocsistersincrime.org or mysteryink.com.
The 7th Annual Conference of the International Crime Fiction Association, in association with Bath Spa University, will be titled "Captivating Criminality 7: Crime Fiction: Memory, History and Revaluation." Slated for July 2-4, 2020, organizers have put out a call for papers that examine changing notions of criminality, punishment, deviance, and policing. What they're seeking: "Abstracts dealing with crime fiction past and present, true crime narratives, television and film studies, and other forms of new media such as blogs, computer games, websites and podcasts are welcome, as are papers adopting a range of theoretical, sociological and historical approaches."
A 12-year-old mystery enthusiast and scholar-in-residence by the name of Joseph has curated the exhibition, "A Century of Mystery and Intrigue," at Florida State University Library's Special Collections and Archives. The exhibit includes trains and works such as Freeman Wills Crofts's Inspector French and the Starvel Hollow Tragedy (1927) and will remain on view until December 20, 2019. (HT to Elizabeth Foxwell at The Bunburyist)
A copy of Graham Greene’s novel, Brighton Rock, more than doubled its estimate when it sold for $93,750, including buyer’s premium, to claim top-lot honors in Heritage Auctions’ Rare Books Auction featuring the Otto Penzler Collection of Mystery Fiction Part II on September 5. The volume is a first edition so rare that only one other copy is known to have made it to the auction block, and that one had a restored jacket. The novel effectively secured Greene’s place in Twentieth Century literature, was adapted multiple times for television and film and appears on the Haycraft Queen Cornerstone list, which is billed as “the definitive library of mystery fiction.”
Writing for Crime Reads, Martin Edwards looked at the renaissance of Golden Age crime fiction, specifically how Agatha Christie and her cohorts came back into fashion and helped to revive the traditional mystery.
Crime Reads's Susan Elia MacNeal looked at "10 novels that explore the world of women spies in the World Wars."
It apears that a woman once described as "Kenya's Sherlock Holmes," private investigator Jane Wawira Mugo, is in a spot of trouble. The Directorate of Criminal Investigations has placed her on the country's Most Wanted list for "a list of alleged crimes she has masterminded read out like a paragraph from a crime thriller novel."
Want to spend the night in a library? If you travel to Wales, you're in luck. The Gladstone Library, the only residential library in Great Britain, houses 150,000 written works, including 32,000 books that were part of the collection of four-term Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone, for whom the library is named. Established in 1906, the library’s onsite 26-room B&B still draws guests from around the United Kingdom, Europe, and United States.
This week's crime poem at the 5-2 is "Post-Enlistment Trail" by David S. Pointer.
In the Q&A roundup, David Lagercrantz spoke with Parade Magazine about saying good-bye to Lisbeth Salander, as he moves on to other literary endeavors; Anthony O’Neill chatted about his new novel, The Devil Upstairs, an allegorical thriller set in modern-day Edinburgh; and the Writers Who Kill's E.B. Davis interviewed Marilyn Levinson, a/k/a Allison Brook, about her Haunted Library mystery series and also chatted with Ellen Byron about her Cajun Country series.
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