As part of the celebrations surrounding Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Awards season, MWA released a schedule for the 2023 Symposium Panels featuring the 2023 Edgar Nominees via ZOOM. All panels are live-streamed via the MWA YouTube channel and will be archived there, as well. You can also view the livestream of last year’s banquet on YouTube via this link.
Here's some awards fit for spring: the annual German Garden Book Prizes. The Best Garden Ebook honor went to the crime novel, Die Kirschen in Des Mörders Garten ("The Cherries in the Murderer's Garden"), by Inka Stein, while the award for Best Book on Gardening Poetry or Prose was won by the crime novel, Gärten, Gift und tote Mann ("Gardens, Poison, and a Dead Man") by poisonous plant expert Claudia Blasl, about two retired amateur gardeners who are on the hunt for mole crickets and assassins.
Coming up at the end of this month, the Anaheim Public Library Foundation will present the 26th Annual Mystery Authors Luncheon & Silent Auction featuring a panel of best-selling authors David Putnam, George Fong, and Rachel Howzell Hall, with award-winning author Sheila Lowe as moderator. For more information and tickets, click on over here.
Janet Rudolph has lists of Passover-themed and Easter-themed crime fiction over on her Mystery Fanfare website for your holiday reading pleasure.
You gotta love the Scandinavians: Iceland has the Christmas book flood or Yule book flood when readers celebrate the annual release of new books occurring in the months before Christmas, and Norway has its Easter tradition of Indulging on crime fiction, known as påskekrim. In the weeks leading up to Easter, bookshops promote their Easter crime compilations and offers, while newspapers will detail the TV shows and movies you can enjoy over the holiday, with British detective and police procedural shows perennial favorites.
Clover Press has published a new illustrated edition featuring Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op, which includes the stories "Arson Plus" (Oct. 1923), "Crooked Souls" (Oct. 1923), "Slippery Fingers" (Oct. 1923), "It" (Nov. 1923), and "Bodies Piled Up" (Dec. 1923), with illustrations by John K. Snyder III. (HT to Elizabeth Foxwell and the Bunburyist blog)
The Rap Sheet makes note of the 25th anniversary this month of The Thrilling Detective website. The ever-expanding site run by Kevin Burton Smith keeps adding resources to one of the most comprehensive repositories of fictional private eyes. Specifically for this 25th anniversary, Smith has posted "The Autobiography of Matthew Scudder," an excerpted work of fiction by Lawrence Block.
The market town of Wallingford in Oxfordshire, UK, is marking the Murder Mystery Weekend on September 9-10, 2023 with an unveiling of a bronze statue celebrating its famous former resident, Dame Agatha Christie. The famed Queen of Crime and internationally acclaimed author lived in Wallingford for 42 years (1934-1976), and was a popular figure around town.
Amazon continues its cost-cutting measures apace. First it was laying off almost 30,000 staffers, then it was eliminating its newspaper/magazine subscription service, closing the textbook buyback service, shuttering all of its brick-and-mortar bookstores, and cutting off the publishing house, Westland, which published works of several bestselling authors in India. Now, Amazon is also shutting down the Book Depository online shop that it bought in 2011, and one has to wonder if other book services are under the gun, including Abe Books et al - especially since Kobo just announced it's opening its Kobo Plus subscription service to the U.S. market, making it a viable alternative to Kindle Unlimited and Audible.
This week's crime poem at the 5-2 weekly is "Pale Walls: A Villanelle for a Villainess" by Hannah Mae Karau.
In the Q&A roundup, The Rap Sheet has an interview with Kate Stine, who has served for the past two decades as editor of Mystery Scene Magazine, which is sadly ceasing publication; Crime Fiction Lover chatted with Stona Fitch about his career and latest novel, Death Watch, which is set in the high stakes world of New York advertising; and Lisa Haselton spoke with suspense author Rhonda Parker Taylor about her new novel, Crossroads.
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