New York City Noir at the Bar will host its first virtual event of the New Year on January 9th from 7-9 p.m. Authors currently scheduled to participate include Stuart Neville, Jay Stringer, Peter Rozovsky, Richie Narvaez, Adrian McKinty, Nikki Dolson, Gabino Iglesias, and Jen Conley. Scott Adlerberg will take on hosting duties for the evening. (Wondering what Noir at the Bar is all about? Lit Reactor had this explanation from a few years ago.)
Thriller author John le Carré has died at the age of 89. Best known for stories of complex cold war intrigue, he began his career as a real-life spy in postwar Europe. As The Guardian noted, le Carré explored the gap between the west’s high-flown rhetoric of freedom and the gritty reality of defending it, in novels such as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Night Manager, which gained him critical acclaim and made him a bestseller around the world. The New York Times also had a look back at le Carré, calling him, "a Master of Spy Novels Where the Real Action Was Internal."
This week, we also lost mystery author/editor John Daniel. Daniel wrote four well-reviewed mysteries (the Guy Mallon series) and ten other books in various genres, and published hundreds of books by other authors as an editor of Perseverance Press. (HT to Mystery Fanfare)
The latest edition of Mystery Readers Journal: Irish Mysteries (Volume 36: 4, Winter 2020-2021) is on sale now. In addition to articles such as "Irish Mystery Writers of the Golden Age" by Patricia Cook and columns such as "Crime Seen: Green Screen" by Kate Derie, there are twenty-plus Author! Author! essays from James Benn, John Banville, Tana French, and many more. You can read two of these offerings online, "Stories from Ireland’s Thin Places" by Erin Hart and "Noir in Belfast" by Adrian McKinty.
There are also new crime short stories up at Tough, "The Ballad of John Rider," by Jeff Esterholm; Shotgun Honey: "Fore!" by Alan Orloff; and Beat to a Pulp: "The Way of Our Now" by Kieran Shea.
California’s notorious Zodiac Killer, the subject of numerous films, television series, podcasts and books over the last half-century, has finally had one of his taunting messages decoded. A letter sent to the San Francisco Chronicle in 1969 was finally cracked by a trio of code breakers - David Oranchak, a software developer in Virginia, Jarl Van Eycke, a Belgian computer programmer, and Sam Blake, an Australian mathematician. Their efforts revealed that the serial killer's message mocked the efforts to find him, saying, "I hope you are having lots of fun in trying to catch me..." The letter contained a mixture of letters, numbers and symbols, and has been studied by numerous authors, criminologists and detectives over the years. It still doesn’t reveal the name of the unknown killer, but the decoding was done in hopes that it might provide new clues as to the person who's been tied to at least 37 murders.
Crime writers take note: Scientists at Tokyo University of Science have made it possible for forensic identification of single dyed hair strand. In a recent study, the team combined two modern techniques, called surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy and X-ray fluorescence, to distinguish between different colors in individual hair strands. Both these techniques are almost non-destructive and can be conducted with portable devices, making this a promising way to get supportive evidence in forensic investigations.
The latest crime poem at the 5-2 Weekly is "Winter" by Nancy Scott.
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