A "Noir at the 'Voir" event is coming up Tuesday, August 22 at The Boathouse at Sunday Park in Midlothian, Virginia. Host Josh Pachter will be joined by authors Maya Corrigan, Eleanor Cawood Jones, Ken Lawrence, Hugh Lessig, Shawn Reilly Simmons, and Lane Stone in reading from their works. Attendees can also enjoy dinner, cocktails, and the view of the beautiful Swift Creek Reservoir. Come early to make sure you get a seat and a ticket for a free raffle, with bags of books donated by event co-sponsors, including Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, Crippen & Landru Publishers, Destination Murders, Genius Book Publishing, Atria Books, the Lifelong Learning Institute in Chesterfield, and more.
Terror Australis Readers and Writers Festival, Tasmania's International Crime and Mystery Festival, returns Thursday, October 26 to Sunday, October 29 at the Kermandie Hotel in Port Huon. This year's theme is Tassie Vice (think 80s detective shows, the rise of the amateur sleuth, and How to Host a Murder dinners). The panels will include featured authors such as Ann Cleeves, Garry Disher, Vanda Symon, David Owen, and a host of others. The event is partnering with the Way Down South Arts production team and is supported by Regional Arts Australia, RANT Arts, the Tasmanian Government, and the Australian Government.
Murder by the Book, a crime fiction-focused independent bookstore in Houston, TX, is partnering with Abby Endler from Crime By The Book to curate a new book subscription service. Crime by the Box will deliver a hand-selected, newly-released signed hardcover mystery, thriller, or suspense novel to readers on a monthly basis plus some little extras like further reading recommendations and exclusive author content. As an added bonus, Murder by the Book will also host in-store events with each of the Crime by the Box featured authors.
Seiichi Morimura was a Japanese author reported to have written about 300 books, nearly all of them mystery novels. But he might be most widely known for his 1981 nonfiction book, Akuma no Hoshoku (The Devil’s Gluttony), a searing exposé of the Japanese Army’s secret biological warfare program during WWII. The New York Times had an obituary of Morimura, who died this month at the age of 90.
The Bookseller reported that Severn House has scooped Playing Dead, a new anthology from members of the Detection Club, including Ann Cleeves, Elly Griffiths, Felix Francis and Lynne Truss, edited by novelist Martin Edwards. The anthology is due to be published in spring 2025 in celebration of the 80th birthday of the Detection Club’s seventh president, Simon Brett. Edwards is the eighth and current president of the Detection Club, the world’s oldest social network of crime writers, formed in 1930. Previous members include Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers, G K Chesterton, and John le Carré.
The blog, Beneath the Stains of Time, compiled an overview of "The Locked Room Mystery & Impossible Crime Story in the 21st Century: A Brief Historic Overview of the First Twenty (Some) Years." Although the crime fiction subgenre dates all the way back to Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), the Covid-era lockdowns prompted a bit of a resurgence.
Writing for The Daily Yonder, Keith Roysdon turned a spotlight on rural crime fiction, while Molly Odintz over at CrimeReads looked outward for "The Best International Crime Fiction of August 2023."
I'm a member of several writer forums, and the hottest topic these days is artificial intelligence (AI) and the potential impact it will have—and is already having—on writing and publishing. It's a very controversial and highly charged issue, with a case in point being Death of an Author, a crime novel "written" almost entirely by three different AI programs (ChatGPT, Sudowrite and Cohere). The Sydney Morning Herald wonders if this is the beginning of the end for human authors.
If you have a New York Times subscription, check out the essay by Amor Towles, "All Hail the Long-Suffering Cadaver." Once at the center of the murder mystery, Towles argues that the cadaver has become increasingly incidental to the action and now figures as little more than a prop.
This week's crime poem at the 5-2 Weekly is "Thoughts and Prayers" by Jennifer Lagier.