The finalists for the An Post Irish Book Awards were announced this week. Readers and fans will be able to vote online for their favorites through November 16, with the category winners to be announced in a virtual awards ceremony on November 25th. Those vying for Best Crime Fiction include The Nothing Man by Catherine Ryan Howard; The Cutting Place by Jane Casey; Our Little Cruelties by Liz Nugent; After the Silence by Louise O'Neill; The Guest List by Lucy Foley; and Fifty Fifty by Steve Cavanagh.
Crime fiction authors Hank Phillippi Ryan and Karen Dionne are hosting a project called The Back Room, a series of online events that start with a short introduction to a panel of 4 authors. The audience is then divided into 4 breakout rooms where they remain for the rest of the program while the authors visit each room in turn. Everyone’s video is turned on and their mics are unmuted, allowing for informal, face-to-face discussion. The next event is October 29, 7 PM ET, with guest authors Brian Andrews, William Kent Krueger, Paula Munier, and Julia Spencer-Fleming.
Penguin Random House has announced its new partnership with PEN America, Out Of Print, and When We All Vote for a collaborative effort called Book the Vote, a joint effort to "help you feel empowered, get active, and make your voice heard." The site includes videos, featured topical books, and merchandise, with a portion of sales donated to PEN America and their Free Speech 2020 campaign.
The NYT featured an article on how indie bookstores are faring during the pandemic, and it isn't all that great. According to the American Booksellers Association, more than one independent bookstore has closed each week since the pandemic began. Many of those still standing are staring down the crucial holiday season and seeing a toxic mix of higher expenses, lower sales and enormous uncertainty. This is why it's important to remember to shop your local indie stores, many of which have online sales, curbside pickup, and even delivery in some areas. Or you can shop via BookShop for ebooks and prints and Libro.Fm for audiobooks, both of which share profits with local bookstores.
Sad news this week: Jill Paton Walsh passed away at the age of 83. Jill was an accomplished author in several fields, including her short series of novels set in Cambridge and featuring Imogen Quy. She also was tasked with completing the unfinished Dorothy L. Sayers novel, Thrones, Dominations, and went on to publish three more books featuring Sayers's iconic Lord Peter Wimsey. (HT to Martin Edwards)
Little, Brown has made changes to its Jimmy Patterson Books imprint, the children’s publishing unit created by the company and mega-selling author James Patterson five years ago. Under the reorganization, the imprint will focus almost exclusively on publishing Patterson’s children’s books as well as looking for collaborations and partnerships. No new outside authors will be acquired for the imprint.
Last week, I mentioned the auction of some of Otto Penzler's collection of rare crime fiction titles, and apparently it was a successful venture. Sales of those books helped push Heritage Auctions’ event past $2.2 million. A couple of the standouts included an inscribed first edition of Earl Derr Biggers' 1925 The House Without a Key – the very first entry in the Charlie Chan mystery series – which brought in $50,000, more than 12 times its pre-auction estimate; and signed first editions of Ellery Queen and Rex Stout mysteries that also brought in multiple times their original estimates. If you missed your chance, even more books from Penzler’s shelves will be made available during three online sessions to be held Dec. 5-7, including many titles seldom seen at auction.
In 1847, a financially struggling Edgar Allan Poe wrote a letter to former Philadelphia mayor, dramatist, magazine editor, and lawyer Robert Taylor Conrad asking for $40. The missive, noted as one of the highest quality Poe letters to-date, recently sold at an online auction for more than $125,000.
An arrest has been made in the stabbing death ten years ago of bookseller Sherry Black, owner of B&W Billiards & Books in South Salt Lake City, Utah. Deseret News reported that Adam Antonio Spencer Durborow was arrested Saturday for investigation of aggravated murder and aggravated burglary, but local police "have released few other details about what led them to Durborow or how they were able to crack the high-profile, decade-old cold case." That being said, in 2017, on the seventh anniversary of Black’s death, police announced they had put the DNA through a phenotyping process. Phenotyping predicts a person’s physical appearance and ancestry using genetic codes.
In another real-life mystery that is over a century old, seventy-two human bones uncovered in 2016 in an Ohio home have now been identified as belonging to Hallie Armstrong, an 18-year-old schoolteacher who died in 1881. Although the local police ruled out homicide, another mystery lingers: who really was Hallie Armstrong and how did her remains end up in a barn in New London, a hundred years after her death?
A new set of assessment tools shows promise in capturing how the COVID-19 pandemic affects patterns of criminal activity. Previous research has demonstrated how crime patterns can be affected by regular seasonal factors, such as holidays and hours of darkness. However, few studies have investigated how crime within a community responds to exceptional events that can significantly disrupt everyday life, such as natural disasters, terrorist attacks, the Olympics, or the COVID-19 pandemic. Preliminary evidence has linked the pandemic to increased rates of domestic violence and steep declines in other forms of crime.
The latest crime poem at the 5-2 Weekly is "Policing" by Linda Lerner.
In the Q&A roundup, the creators of the Unlikeable Female Characters Podcast, Wendy Heard and Layne Fargo, discussed the tricky business of fictional murder; Mark Pryor chatted with The Mystery People about the latest Hugo Marston novel, The French Widow; Lisa Haselton spoke with thriller author, John Casey, about his psychological spy thriller trilogy, Devolution, Evolution, and Revelation; Cathi Unsworth stopped by the CrimeTime blog to talk about the re-release of Bad Penny Blues, a fictionalized investigation into the Jack the Stripper murders (1960s London’s biggest unsolved case); and Author Interviews welcomed Antony Johnston, award-winning graphic novelist, author, and games writer, whose graphic spy thriller, The Coldest City, was made into the multi-million-dollar blockbuster, Atomic Blonde, starring Charlize Theron, and James McAvoy.
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