Debut books in the crime and mystery genre won all six awards in the Australia Sisters in Crime’s 22nd Davitt Awards this past weekend. The annual awards for best Aussie women’s crime books were presented by award-winning journalist and true crime writer, Louise Milligan, at a gala dinner at South Melbourne’s Rising Sun Hotel, the first live ceremony since 2019. The winners include: Best Adult Novel: Once There Were Wolves by Charlotte McConaghy; Best Young Adult Novel: The Gaps by Leanne Hall; Best Children's Novel: The Detective's Guide to Ocean Travel by Nicki Greenberg; Best Debut Book and Readers' Choice: Before You Knew My Name by Jacqueline Bublitz; and Best Non-Fiction Book: The Winter Road: A Story of Legacy, Land and a Killing at Croppa Creek by Kate Holden.
The shortlists for the inaugural Fingerprint Awards were announced. The awards, which recognize the best titles in the crime genre (and most of which are voted for by readers), are held as part of the Capital Crime Festival. The titles up for Crime Book of the Year include Val McDermid’s 1979, Mick Herron’s Slough House, Sarah Pearse's The Sanatorium; Eva Björg Ægisdóttir's Girls Who Lie; and Janice Hallett’s debut, The Appeal, which won the John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger earlier this year. For all the shortlisted titles, including Thriller Book of the Year, Historical Crime Book of the Year 2021, Debut Book of the Year 2021, Genre-Busting Book of the Year 2021, and Audiobook of the Year 2021, follow this link. Readers can vote for their preferred winners through September 19, and winners will be announced September 29. (HT to Shots Magazine)
The finalists for the 2022 Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Novel and Best First Novel were announced. The winners will be handed out at a special event in Christchurch, New Zealand, on September 19. The contenders for Best Novel include The Devils You Know by Ben Sanders; Before You Knew My Name by Jacqueline Bublitz; She's A Killer by Kirsten McDougall; Quiet In Her Bones by Nalini Singh; The Quiet People by Paul Cleave, and Nancy Business by Rwr McDonald. The finalists for Best Debut are Isobar Precinct by Angelique Kasmara; Before You Knew My Name by Jacqueline Bublitz; Waking The Tiger by Mark Wightman; Small Mouth Demon by Matt Zwartz; and Shadow Over Edmund Street by Suzanne Frankham.
If you find yourself in Christchurch for the awards ceremony, you might want to check out a small house in the Cashmere Hills, one of Christchurch’s lesser known treasures. It's the former home of celebrated crime writer, theatre director, and artist Ngaio Marsh (for whom the above awards are named), preserved largely as it was when she died there in 1982 complete with many of her possessions. Inside the clapboard villa is a trove of artwork, furniture, and mementos that tell the story of an extraordinary life spent in the home from childhood to old age. Some of these objects will appear in a new exhibition at Tūranga, Christchurch’s central library, to mark the fortieth anniversary of Marsh’s death and bring fresh attention to the museum, which has been managed and preserved as a museum by a trust since 1996.
The Guardian featured an article by Lucy Worsley, author of Agatha Christie: A Very Elusive Woman. The book tries to puzzle through the real-life mystery of why the world’s bestselling author vanished for 11 days in 1926. Did she really go into hiding to frame her husband for murder as some sources speculated? Digging through letters and accounts, Worsley had found that Christie was "at the beginning of a nervous breakdown" and wrote a one point that she "just wanted my life to end."
Via The Conversation: "How crime fiction went global, embracing themes from decolonization to climate change." Once seen as the purview of British and American writers, crime fiction is very much a global phenomenon, with fictional investigators like Lisbeth Salander, Kurt Wallander and Jules Maigret perhaps as well known today as Hercule Poirot, Sam Spade, and Philip Marlowe.
A batch of Charles Dickens’s letters that have remained unseen and unpublished are to go on display for the first time.The eleven letters include assorted invitation notes and offer insights into the author’s reading habits and writing projects as well as details about a trip to Switzerland written to a friend. The letters are among more than 300 items acquired by the Charles Dickens Museum from a US collector in 2020, including personal objects, portraits, sketches, playbills and books.
Nissen Richards Studio has designed an exhibition in The National Library of Norway in Oslo titled "Labyrinth: Tracing Harry Hole." The exhibit focuses on the main character from the popular Norwegian crime novel series by Jo Nesbø, and the idea is for the exhibition to become a "detective game for the visitor" by "mimicking clues that Harry Hole might find and weave together" in the books, according to the studio’s director, Pippa Nissen. The exhibition is open to the public and closes on November 5, 2022.
This week's crime poem at the 5-2 weekly is "Orange Julius" by Amy Grech.
In the Q&A roundup, E.B. Davis interviewed Valerie Burns about her brand-new culinary cozy series that introduces Maddy Montgomery, a social media expert who’s starting over in small town Michigan after inheriting her great-aunt’s bakery and a 200-pound English Mastiff named Baby; and Deborah Kalb spoke with Martin Edwards about his new book, The Life of Crime: Detecting the History of Mysteries and Their Creators.
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