The 2021 winners of West Coast Crime's Lefty Awards were presented virtually this past weekend. Top nods included Best Humorous Mystery Novel: Ellen Byron, Murder in the Bayou Boneyard; Best Historical Mystery Novel for books set before 1970: Catriona McPherson, The Turning Tide; Best Debut Mystery Novel, David Heska Wanbli Weiden, Winter Counts; and Best Mystery Novel (not in other categories), Louise Penny, All the Devils Are Here. For a list of the finalists in the various categories, check out the conference's official website.
The Crime Writers Association today unveiled the longlists for the 2021 Dagger Awards, the premier literary crime-writing awards in the United Kingdom. Entries to the various categories are nominated by publishers and/or librarians (with the exception of the Debut Dagger) and judged independently of the CWA by industry professionals. For all the highlights of this year's slate, check out this wrap-up from Ayo Onatade at the Shots Magazine blog.
The finalists for the Bony Blithe/Bloody Words Light Mystery Award were also announced for the conference/award's tenth season celebrating Canadian crime fiction on the lighter side. As the website states, "Pandammit or no pandammit, Canadian crime writing is thriving." The 2021 honorees include Vicki Delany, There’s a Murder Afoot; Candas Jane Dorsey, The Adventures of Isabel; Liz Ireland, Mrs. Claus and the Santaland Slayings; Thomas King, Obsidian; and Iona Wishaw, A Match Made for Murder.
The finalists for this year's Hugo Awards for best sci-fi and speculative fiction were also announced, and as usual there are some crime-themed crossovers such as Rebecca Roanhorse's Black Sun and Martha Wells' latest Murderbot novel, Network Effect.
There's a call for papers for Edinburgh Conan Doyle Network Conference, "Conan Doyle and Storytelling," December 10-11, 2021, at Birkbeck, University of London. Organizers welcome proposals for 20-minute papers, which consider Conan Doyle’s writing in all wider contexts, and they offer up some suggested themes you can check out via the Shots Magazine blog. Interested writers should send along abstracts of 200–300 words together with a brief biography by July 31.
The spring issue of Suspense Magazine is out, featuring interviews with J.A. Jance, Jonathan Kellerman, Don Bentley, Dietrich Kalteis, and Greg F. Gifune; new short fiction by Julia Shraytman, Dan A. Cardoza, Megan Towey, Bailey Day Simpson, Jeffrey A. Lockwood, Martha Reed, and Tom Halford; a detailed look at the TV mini-series, Harper's Island; book reviews and more.
The mystery of Harry Houdini's mystery: Joe Notaro is reproducing The Zanetti Mystery (1925), featuring the "genius faker and arch-rogue" Zanetti, with future blog posts to have additional chapters. The tale was published under Houdini's name, but Notaro believes it was ghostwritten by Fulton Oursler, a/k/a mystery author Anthony Abbot. (HT Elizabeth Foxwell at the Bunburyist blog.)
Over at the Kill Zone blog, Debbie Burke takes a look at "Eugene Francois Vidocq and the Origins of Criminology."
If you're a fan of graphic novels and also Arthur Conan Doyle's most famous creation, Book Riot has "5 Sherlock Holmes Comics for You to Investigate."
Featured at the Page 99 Test this week: Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad by Michela Wrong. The book details a powerful investigation into a grisly political murder and the authoritarian regime behind it in Rwanda.
This week's crime poem at the 5-2 is "Power Murder Ballads" by Scott Cumming.
In the Q&A roundup, Author Interviews welcomed Karla Holloway to discuss her debut novel, A Death in Harlem, a mystery set during the Harlem Renaissance, and they also spoke with Adam Mitzner about his new thriller, The Perfect Marriage; CrimeReads chatted with Alan Parks, author of the Harry McCoy novels, about drugs, noir, and Glasgow in the 1970s; Shots Magazine spoke with crime writer Claire McGowan about her new true-crime audiobook project, The Vanishing Triangle, which shines a light on the unsolved disappearance of at least eight women from mid-nineties Dublin; and Erica Wright spoke with Marilyn Stasio, the recently retired crime fiction critic for The New York Times, about how she got her start, how crime fiction got taken seriously, and what she's reading now.
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