The 2022 NoirCon returns this weekend, Friday, Oct. 21 through Sunday, Oct. 23, marking the first time the event has held a virtual conference. The three-day symposium celebrates noir in all its artistic incarnations with live and pre-recorded events, including panel discussions, award ceremonies, author talks, art exhibitions, movie screenings, and more. Registration includes access to the Accelevents platform for 30 days after the event, so attendees can re-watch events or catch up on panels they missed. The award winners this year include Megan Abbott, Marcia Muller, Bill Pronzini, and Sarah Weinman, and conference organizers will also be celebrating the 2018 award winners, Walter Mosley, Geoffrey O'Brien, Dana Polan, and Max Rudin after the biannual event was cancelled due to Covid.
Author and academic Preti Taneja has won the 2022 Gordon Burn prize for Aftermath, her "unflinching work of narrative non-fiction." The winning title is about the London Bridge stabbing in 2019, when 28-year-old terrorist, Usman Khan, attacked five people, two fatally. Taneja realized shortly afterwards that she had known Khan when he was a student in a creative writing class she had taught two years earlier in HMP Whitemoor, where he was incarcerated at the time. Guardian reviewer, Helen Pidd, praised Aftermath and the way the author "blends journalism, memoir, poetry and literary criticism in an attempt to process an event she will never truly understand." The genre-blurring book topped a six-strong shortlist that was judged by a jury chaired by crime writer, Denise Mina.
The ECPA announced the finalists for the Christy Awards for 2022. The award has been honoring and promoting excellence in Christian fiction since 1999. This year's finalists in the Mystery/Suspense/Thriller category include Aftermath by Terri Blackstock; The Barrister and the Letter of Marque by Todd M. Johnson; and On the Cliffs of Foxglove Manor by Jaime Jo Wright.
All About Agatha is a podcast I sometimes featured on my Media Murder for Monday blog posts. I had wondered why the podcast seemed to have stopped publishing new episodes in September, and I recently learned that one of the original co-host Catherine Brobeck, had passed away from a previously undetected genetic disorder just days after her 37th birthday. She and Kemper Donovan established the long-running podcast and set out to read and rank all of Christie's 66 mystery novels and discuss them in exhaustive detail. During their six-year odyssey, thousands of Agatha Christie enthuasists from around the world enjoyed what one listener described as a "joyfully geeky" take on the Queen of Crime's expansive canon. Donovan and Brobeck also lectured at the University of Cambridge on the collective catharsis of the denouement (when the detective gathers everyone in the drawing room to reveal the killer), gave media interviews on the steady stream of new Christie adaptations, and became beloved pillars of the close-knit community of devout Christie fans and scholars. At the time of Brobeck's death, she and Donovan had explored 60 novels. With just six left to review, Donovan decided to keep the podcast going. The final novel episode of "All About Agatha," released in September, was dedicated to Curtain, the last book published in Christie's lifetime.
The British Antique Museum in Kamakura City, Japan, includes a Sherlock Holmes Room that pays tribute to the Great Detective and features Victorian/Edwardian furnishings. It is modeled after the Sherlock Holmes Museum in London, situated at 221B Baker Street, which, according to the stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, was where Holmes resided from 1881 to 1904. The rooms have been faithfully maintained to give visitors from all round the globe an insight into the life and stories of the world’s first consulting detective, and a memorable, authentic experience of Victorian London. The four-storey Georgian townhouse dates back to 1815 and once served for many decades as a lodging house, but is now listed to protect its architectural and cultural heritage, boasting a blue plaque to commemorate the period of Holmes’ residency. The Sherlock Holmes Museum opened its iconic front door in 1990, and now attracts thousands of visitors from all over the world making a pilgrimage to the home of their literary hero. (HT to Elizabeth Foxwell at the Bunburyist blog)
Here's a news item from the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction department: apparently, Oakland Cops hope to arm robots with lethal shotguns. What could possibly go wrong?
This week's crime poem at the 5-2 weekly is "Heave Ho" by Rena J. Worley.
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