Sisters in Crime announced that Shizuka Otake of Jackson Heights, New York, has been named the winner of the 2022 Eleanor Taylor Bland Emerging Crime Writers of Color Award. Her submission, Murder in Tokyo, is a story of a Japanese American teen's life which is shattered when her boyfriend is arrested as the prime suspect in a classmate's murder. The five runners-up include: Danielle Arceneaux (Brooklyn, NY), Amber Boothe (Crowthorne, England), Jennifer K. Morita (Sacramento, CA), Valerie Kemp (Ann Arbor, MI), and Kathy A. Norris (Los Angeles, CA).
Lambda Literary, the nation’s oldest and largest literary arts organization advancing LGBTQ literature, announced the winners of the 2022 Lambda Literary Awards, or the "Lammys." This year's winner of the LGBTQ Mystery/Thriller category was The Savage Kind by John Copenhaver. The other finalists include Bath Haus by P.J. Vernon; Finding the Vein by Jennifer Hanlon Wilde; Lies With Man by Michael Nava; and Murder Under Her Skin by Stephen Spotswood.
The organizers of the annual Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year have announced the 2022 shortlists: The Night Hawks, by Elly Griffiths; True Crime Story, by Joseph Knox; Daughters of Night, by Laura Shepherd-Robinson; Slough House, by Mick Herron; Midnight at Malabar House, by Vaseem Khan; and The Last Thing to Burn, by Will Dean. Readers can now vote on the shortlisted titles through Friday July 8, with the winner being crowned at the launch of the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival on July 21.
Goldsboro Books announced the twelve titles longlisted for the 2022 Glass Bell Award, including some crime fiction titles. Now in its sixth year, the Glass Bell Award celebrates the best storytelling across contemporary fiction, regardless of genre and is awarded annually to "a compelling novel with brilliant characterisation and a distinct voice that is confidently written and assuredly realised." The shortlist of six will be announced on July 28th with the winner, who will receive both £2,000, and a beautiful, handmade glass bell, to be announced on September 8th. Last year, debut author Clare Whitfield was announced as the fifth winner of the prize for her historical thriller, People of Abandoned Character, an atmospheric take on the Jack the Ripper story.
Writer's Digest announced that the opening keynote for this year's WD Novel Writing Conference October 20-23 in Pasadena, California, is Attica Locke. Locke's novels have been nominated or won the Edgar Awards, Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction, Ernest Gaines Award for Literary Excellence; Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, Women's Prize for Fiction, and the NAACP Image Award. A former fellow at the Sundance Institute's Feature Filmmaker's Lab, Locke works as a screenwriter as well, most recently on Netflix's When They See Us and the Hulu adaptation of Little Fires Everywhere.
The next issue of Mystery Readers Journal will focus on Art Mysteries, and editor, Janet Rudolph, is seeking reviews, articles, and Author! Author! essays. Reviews are 50-250 words; articles: 250-1000 words; and Author! Author! essays: 500-1000 words. As Rudolph added, "Author Author! Essays are first person, about yourself, your books, and your unique take on Art Mysteries...Think of it as chatting with friends and other writers in the bar or cafe or on Zoom about your work and your 'Art Mystery' connection."
The New Yorker reported on "Why We’re Living Through an Agatha Christie Renaissance." As the article states, "It is easy to feel that today’s challenges, large and small, offer a surplus of murder-mystery-esque dread without the necessary doses of humanity, nor the vital pleasures of resolution. How reassuring—how resoundingly enjoyable—it is to spend time in Christie’s world, where complexity can be held with confidence, and where even the darkest turns serve only to draw us deeper into the game." The article also references the latest adaptation of Christie's work, Why Didn't They Ask Evans? starring Hugh Laurie, which is streaming now on BritBox.
Speaking of Dame Agatha, The Wall Street Journal noted how young people are discovering a hot new writer...Agatha Christie. "Agatha is sparking with younger readers, and I don’t see that with any other writer from her period," said Devin Abraham, owner of the Once Upon A Crime mystery bookstore in Minneapolis. (HT to The Passive Voice)
Unseen works by the "queen of gothic fiction," Shirley Jackson, have been published in Strand Magazine. In "Charlie Roberts," a couple are planning a dinner party, but beneath their familiar banter is palpable but unexpressed tension. The title refers to the owner of a pocket-knife left behind at the couple’s home, and it’s clear that something has happened to him. The other short, "Only Stand and Wait," touches on isolation, insight and denial – themes found in Jackson’s novels The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. A previously unpublished story, "Adventure on a Bad Night," was published in 2020 after being discovered by Jackson’s son in boxes of his mother’s papers donated to the Library of Congress.
This week's crime poem at the 5-2 Weekly is "Nothing is Normal Here" by Jennifer Lagier.
In the Q&A roundup, E. B. Davis at the Writers Who Kill blog interviewed Ellen Byron about Bayou Book Thief, the first installment in the new Vintage Cookbook cozy mystery series; Harini Nagrenda spoke with Sujata Massey about her series featuring The Bangalore Detectives Club; and Indie Crime Scene chatted with Stephen G. Eoannou, whose novel Rook, which is based on the true story of Al Nussbaum, a bank robbing genius from Buffalo, New York, has its debut on June 28.
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