Mick Herron has won the Theakston Old Peculier crime novel of the year award, after his fifth time being shortlisted in six years, at an announcement made during the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate, England. Herron won the award for Slough House, the seventh installment in his series of the same name, which follows a band of failed spies and was recently turned into an Apple TV+ show starring Gary Oldman and Kristin Scott Thomas. Joseph Knox’s True Crime Story was also highly commended by the judges. The other books on the shortlist were The Night Hawks by Elly Griffiths; Daughters of Night by Laura Shepherd-Robinson; Midnight at Malabar House by Vaseem Khan; and The Last Thing to Burn by Will Dean. The ceremony also saw Michael Connelly receive the Outstanding Contribution to Crime Fiction award in recognition of his three-decade writing career. He follows in the footsteps of previous honorees Ian Rankin, Lynda La Plante, Lee Child, Val McDermid and PD James.
Sisters in Crime Australia announced the shortlist for the 22nd Davitt Awards, which recognize the best crime and mystery books by Australian women. The awards are presented in six categories: adult crime novel; YA crime novel; children's crime novel; nonfiction crime book; debut crime book (any category); and Readers' Choice (as voted by the members of Sisters in Crime Australia). The winner will be honored August 27 at a ceremony in Melbourne.
This weekend, the conference, "Sherlock Holmes and the British Empire," will be open to all Sherlockians from on July 29-31 at the Bear Mountain Inn, near West Point, NY. You do not need to be a member of the sponsoring organization, the Baker Street Irregulars, in order to attend. For more information and to register, click on over here.
Some sad news to report this week: Stuart Woods, an author of more than 90 novels, many featuring the character of lawyer-investigator Stone Barrington, has died. He was 84. 1981’s Chiefs, about three generations of lawmen and the murder of a teenager in a small southern town, won literary awards and was made into a CBS miniseries starring Charlton Heston, Danny Glover, Billy Dee Williams and John Goodman. Putnam plans to release Black Dog, the 62nd book in Stone Barrington series on August 2 and Distant Thunder, the 63rd book in the series, on October 11.
A new exhibit is open at the New-York Historical Society called "PEN America at 100: A Century of Defending the Written Word," which honors the organization's mission to promote a diverse literary culture and advocate for persecuted writers worldwide. The installation includes a historical survey of the organization’s members and work, as recorded in dozens of letters, posters, photographs and other documents. PEN (a loose acronym for Poets and Playwrights, Editors and Essayists and Novelists) began after World War I as a social club for writers but soon coalesced around freedom of expression and human rights. The exhibits include a photograph in a Greenwich Village bookstore of Arthur Miller and Pablo Neruda, whose work had long been banned from the U.S. There’s also a photo of Susan Sontag, E.L. Doctorow, Gay Talese and Norman Mailer at a rally to defend Salman Rushdie from the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa. The PEN America exhibit will be open through October 9, with timed tickets required and Friday evenings set aside as "pay what you can."
In partnership with the Cummings Center for the History of Psychology, the Hower House Museum at the University of Akron (in Ohio) is sponsoring the exhibition, "Poe & Doyle: Victorian Crime Fiction" during September and October. Visitors can learn about how Poe created the contemporary conventions of mystery writing and about how Doyle developed those techniques to create Sherlock Holmes. (HT to Elizabeth Foxwell)
Crime Reads profiled the people behind some of today's best small publishers that specialize in crime fiction. Included are Paul Oliver of Syndicate Books, an imprint devoted to bringing forgotten authors back into print; Charles Ardai of noir publisher Hard Case Crime; Sara Gran, whose brand-new imprint is Dreamland Books; Gregory Shepard of reissue enthusiast Stark House; Jason Pinter of Polis Books; and the late but welcome addition of Michael Nava of Amble Press.
Writing for LitHub, Dwyer Murphy discussed "The Search for the Funniest Crime Novel Ever Written," targeting Elmore Leonard, Donald E. Westlake, and ... Patricia Highsmith.
In a not-so-funny report, it seems they keep finding bodies in the Lake Mead as receding waters from drought expose more and more of the bottom. Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Homicide Lt. Ray Spencer said in May that, "It's likely that we will find additional bodies that have been dumped in Lake Mead" as the water level drops more."
This week's crime poem at the 5-2 weekly is "Wanted" by Michael Zimecki.
In the Q&A roundup, Naomi Hirahara talked with LA crime writer Gary Phillips about the lost landmarks of Los Angeles and his latest novel, One-Shot Harry, which concerns a Black news photographer in LA; Crime Fiction Lover spoke with Sean Munger, an Oregon-based LGBT crime author whose latest novel, The Son Thief, arrives on 2 August, following on from his first crime novel, In Deadly Mirrors; Dwyer Murphy stopped by Crime Reads to chat about writing routines, superstitions, and "reading Elmore Leonard like a Bible"; and Deborah Kalb interviewed Joey Hartstone, a film and television writer whose new crime novel is The Local.
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