Joffe Books announced the shortlist for the Joffe Books Prize for Crime Writers of Colour 2022. This year's pool of entries covered the gamut of gritty police procedurals to wrenching domestic suspense, evocative historical mysteries to page-turning cosies. Out of the longlist of twenty, five stood out, forming the official shortlist: The Labelled Bones by FQ Yeoh; Everyone Is Going To Know by Kingsley Pearson; The Smiling Mandarin by Mai Le Dinh; Red Obsession by Rose Lorimer; and Savage Territory by Sam Genever. The winner will be announced in January 2023.
More sad news for fans of mystery-themed bookstores, as Toronto’s Sleuth of Baker Street, announced it is closing. After forty years, owners Marian Misters and J.D. Singh have decided to retire from both work and bookselling. As Marian noted, "Spending forty years doing something we love has been a great pleasure, but the time has come for other things. There will be a transition period, naturally. What the transition will look like exactly, or how long the transition period will be, is not perfectly clear in our minds—there are a few moving parts and after forty years, it’s with considerable trepidation that we undertake this last, final, turn to our bookselling career—but our need and desire to do this is quite clear. We’ll stumble through this and make decisions as they need to be made."
The 15th year of Writers' Police Academy will once again offer hands-on training classes and sessions taught by leading law enforcement and forensics experts, scientists, and other industry professionals. This year's they've also added a special focus on homicide investigations that includes classes taught by top homicide and crime scene investigators, a coroner who’s also a flight nurse and author, evidence experts, SWAT team members, narcotics experts, behavioral health professionals, use of force and tactical response experts. This year's Guest of Honor is Hank Phillippi Ryan, and the special guest presenters include photojournalist Mike De Sisti, homicide detective/TV personality Steven Spingola (Cold Justice), and renowned serial killer expert Dr. Katherine Ramsland. Registration for the 2023 Writers’ Police Academy is scheduled to open February 1, 2023.
There will be an exhibition featuring Sherlock Holmes materials from Occidental College's Ned Guymon Collection of Mystery and Detective Fiction during the 55th California International Antiquarian Book Fair held February 10–12 in Pasadena. The collection, one of the world's largest in the genre, is composed of some 16,000 items including such Holmesian treasures as an 1887 copy of A Study in Scarlet and other first edition books, magazines, and rare, fascinating ephemera. (HT to Elizabeth Foxwell at The Bunburyist)
As crime fiction continues to dominate sales and its critical reception grows, it has become an increasingly important part of Creative Writing courses. Clues: A Journal of Detection is looking for 500-750 word contributions for a new regular feature for the journal, a forum on teaching. Accounts from all classroom spaces (college, high school, graduate school, prisons, etc.) and teachers at all stages of their careers are welcome, as well as student voices. Submissions are due February 1, 2023. For more information or to submit essays, please contact Jamie Bernthal- Hooker ([email protected]).
On January 26, Penguin Modern Classics will publish three well-regarded novels from the father of the spy thriller, Eric Ambler (1909-1998), including Passage of Arms, The Light of Day, and A Kind of Anger. Ambler is often said to have invented the modern suspense novel, and his disciples include John le Carré, Alfred Hitchcock, Graham Greene, and Len Deighton. (HT to Shots Magazine)
This week's crime poem at the 5-2 weekly is "George Santos, Republican Representative-Elect From New York's Third Congressional District" by Robert Cooperman.
In the Q&A roundup, thriller author MHR Geer joined Lisa Haselton to talk about Geer's new suspense novel, Assumed; Grace Topping chatted with Kait Carson at Writers Who Kill to discuss the reissue of her book, Death by Blue Water; and Thomas Perry took the Page 69 test about his latest thriller, Murder Book.
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