Registration is open for the Suffolk Mystery Authors Festival, which goes all digital this year for the all-day event on March 6. There will be live panels on topics from "Humor Has It: Keeping the Fun in Mystery" to "A Song of Ice and Fire: Writing Strong Women," with close to forty authors participating.
Submissions for the McIlvanney Prize / Scottish Crime Book of the Year are also now open, with a deadline of Friday, April 9. The winner of Crime Book of the Year will receive £1,000, while the winner the Debut of the Year will receive £500. Entries come from full length novels first published in the United Kingdom between August 1 2020 and July 31, 2021. When considering the entries the judges will take into account quality of writing, originality of plot and potential durability in the crime genre.
Take the upcoming long weekend to apply to PEN America's Writing for Justice Fellowship, which commissions writers to create written works of lasting merit that illuminate critical issues related to mass incarceration and catalyze public debate. Submissions close on February 15.
Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies has a call for papers on the topic of "Giallo! The Long History of Italian Television Crime Drama." The special issue will be edited by Luca Barra (Università di Bologna) and Valentina Re (Link Campus, Rome) who are seeking abstract submissions through April 30. There's more info on the Shots Magazine blog, including some suggested topics for consideration.
Shots also took a look ahead at the Chester Himes - Harlem Detective Series being released by Penguin Modern Classics on March 25, 2021. The stories of the pathbreaking Himes, one of crime fiction’s most overlooked writers, take the reader through the criminal underbelly of New York alongside hardboiled Harlem detectives "Coffin" Ed Johnson and "Grave Digger" Jones.
Valentine's Day isn't always about love, as Janet Rudolph's updated Valentine's Day Crime Fiction list will attest.
Writing for The Guardian, Alison Flood investigated "Why Sherlock Holmes Has Become One Of Our Most Enduring Literary Characters." She takes note of some of the more recent entries, including Anthony Horowitz’s sequels; Andrew Lane’s tales of a teenage Holmes; basketball player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's novels about Holmes’s older brother Mycroft; Nancy Springer's Enola Holmes books, giving Holmes and Mycroft a younger sibling; James Lovegrove's combining the worlds of Holmes and HP Lovecraft in the Cthulhu Casebooks; Nicholas Meyer’s forthcoming The Return of the Pharaoh, drawn "from the Reminiscences of John H Watson, MD"; and Bonnie MacBird’s The Three Locks, a new Holmes adventure, which is out in March.
In Valerie Stivers’s Eat Your Words series for the Paris Review, she cooks up recipes drawn from the works of various writers. In her latest installment, she tackles Inspector Montalbano, the creation of one of Italy’s best-loved contemporary authors, Andrea Camilleri (1925–2019).
Over at the Venetian Vase blog, Steven Powell continued his series examining the musical influences in James Ellroy’s work, this time focusing on a single novel, Because the Night, Ellroy’s second novel in his Lloyd Hopkins trilogy.
Allison Epstein applied the Page 69 Test to her debut historical thriller, A Tip for the Hangman, which centers on Christopher Marlowe, a brilliant aspiring playwright, who is pulled into the duplicitous world of international espionage on behalf of Queen Elizabeth I; and Gwen Florio also applied the same test to Best Laid Plans, the first installment of a new mystery series.
The trend of celebrities writing crime fiction seems to have no end in sight, it seems. Even astronauts are jumping into the act.
If you're a fan of Nordic Noir novels, check out this list from Forbes on "Nordic Noir Travel: Scandinavia’s Top Crime Fiction Locations."
Here's a little throwback for you spy fans: a new phishing attack uses Morse code to allow hackers to hide malicious URLs.
Speaking of spying, one man learned the hard way that if you're going to commit a crime, you might be a little more aware of the apps you load onto your cellphone.
Ever wonder about where the term "bookworm" came from?
Will artificial intelligence ever take over the jobs of authors?
The latest flash fiction story at Shotgun Honey is "Remittences" by Pamela Ebel
The latest crime poem at the 5-2 Weekly is "Anything Goes" by Tom Barlow.
In the Q&A roundup, Author Interviews's Marshal Zeringue spoke with Jeri Westerson, the author of fifteen Crispin Guest Medieval Noir novels, and also chatted with former teacher and linguist, Carol Wyer, about her new novel, An Eye for an Eye, which introduces DI Kate Young; and Walter Mosley offered up some background on his first thriller and how he went from working as a computer programmer in 1980's New York City to writing the iconic Devil in a Blue Dress.
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