Mystery Melange

Best-selling author Peter James has been awarded the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in His Majesty The King’s 2026 Birthday Honours List, in recognition of his services to literature and to charity. Best known for his DSI Roy Grace series, now a hit ITV drama, Peter James is the author of over 40 novels, which have been translated into 38 languages. He is also a supporter of many of charities including the Sussex Police Charitable Trust, the RSPCA, the Samaritans, and as an ambassador for The Reading Agency and National Year of Reading 2026.


Lambda Literary revealed the winners of the 38th Annual Lambda "Lammy" Awards for excellence in LGBTQ+ books. The winner of the Best LGBTQ+ Mystery was A Queer Case by Robert Holtom (Titan Books). The other finalists include: Every Sweet Thing Is Bitter by Samantha Crewson (Crooked Lane Books); Girl Falling by Hayley Scrivenor (Flatiron Books); Mirage City by Lev AC Rosen (Minotaur Books); and The Case of the Missing Maid by Rob Osler (Kensington Publishing Corporation).


The One More Page bookstore in Arlington, Virginia, is hosting a panel on "Queer Characters in Crime Fiction" on Thursday, July 9th at 7pm. Authors scheduled to take part include Aggie Blum Thompson (The Neighbors are Watching), John Copenhaver (Hall of Mirrors, Crime Ink), Diana DiGangi (Last Chance Chicago), and Stephen Spotswood (Dead in the Frame).


The Military Writers Society of America (MWSA) named Rosalie Spielman as the 2026 Writer of the Year. The award recognizes Rosalie's "outstanding body of work and her remarkable contributions to the military writing community through her acclaimed series of cozy murder mysteries, each of which has earned MWSA recognition." The Writer of the Year award is MWSA's highest honor, presented annually to an author whose work the organization says exemplifies the values of excellence, integrity, and service that define the military writing community. Rosalie writes the Hometown Mysteries series starring a US Army veteran who returns to her Idaho hometown. The award will be presented during MWSA's annual awards banquet in October.


The Agatha Christie estate publishing house, Agatha Christie Limited, has released a new Ultimate Mystery Edition of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. With the final solution sealed in an envelope at the back of the book, this edition of Agatha Christie's much-loved mystery arrives just in time for the 100 year anniversary of its publication. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was Agatha Christie’s first book to be published by William Collins in the spring of 1926. William Collins became part of HarperCollins and are still Christie’s publishers today. The story formed the basis of the earliest adaptation of Christie’s work Alibi (adapted by Michael Morton), which opened at the Prince of Wales Theatre in London in 1928 and successfully ran for 250 performances.


In February of 2027, Hard Case Crime and Titan Book will be re-releasing Cop Out, a novel by Ellery Queen (the pseudonym for Brooklyn cousins Frederic Dannay and Manfred B Lee). Originally published in 1969, the book hasn’t appeared in print in nearly 50 years. Cop Out is an anomaly in the Ellery Queen bibliography, being one of only two novels by Ellery Queen that don’t feature a detective named Ellery Queen. Included in this 272-page binding will be two bonus stories: "Child Missing!" and "The Case Against Carroll."


Writing for CrimeReads, Scott Adlerberg reconsidered Norman Mailer’s Tough Guys Don’t Dance fifty years later (although it's more like 42, since the book was published in 1984). At the time, Mailer’s attempt at a hardboiled-style murder mystery elicited mixed reactions.


I missed this bit of news back in February, but it appears one literary mystery has been solved. Matthew Vaughn’s latest cinematic offering, Argylle, had obscured the source novel’s author, spending weeks teasing the real identity behind the pseudonym of "Elly Conway." Although many people speculated the real author was among the likes of Taylor Swift or J.K. Rowling, the co-authors have been revealed as Terry Hayes and Tammy Cohen.


This week's crime poem up at the 5-2 Crime Poetry Weekly is "Rudy Giuliani Mutters During His Last Rites" by Chad Parenteau.


In the Q&A roundup, author Hilary Davidson (author of the Lily Moore series and Shadows of New York series) applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Every Lie I Told; and Deborah Kalb spoke with Claudia Gray, author of the new novel, The Fatal Unpleasantness at Netherfield, the latest in her Mr. Darcy & Miss Tilney mystery series based on Jane Austen's classic novels.

Peculier Talent

 

Harrogate International Festivals today announced the shortlist for the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award 2026, one of the UK and Ireland’s most prestigious crime fiction awards. The winner will be revealed on the opening night of the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, Thursday, July 23.

The six books shortlisted for Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year 2026, now in its twenty-second year, showcase works from Tariq Ashkanani, Abigail Dean, Alice Feeney, Elly Griffiths, Mick Herron, and Vaseem Khan, who will compete for the coveted award. The winner, who receives £3,000 and a handmade, engraved oak beer cask provided by T&R Theakston Ltd, will be selected by a panel of seven expert judges, with the public vote representing the eighth judge. 

Readers are now invited to vote for their favorite book to win via this link, with voting closing on Thursday, July 16 at 23:59 GMT. The winner will be revealed on the opening night of Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival at a special awards ceremony hosted by Steph McGovern.


The 2026 shortlist (in alphabetical order by surname) is:

• The Midnight King by Tariq Ashkanani (Profile Books, Viper)
• The Death of Us by Abigail Dean (HarperCollins, Hemlock Press)
• Beautiful Ugly by Alice Feeney (Pan Macmillan, Pan Fiction)
• The Frozen People by Elly Griffiths (Quercus Books)
• Clown Town by Mick Herron (John Murray Books, Baskerville)
• Quantum of Menace by Vaseem Khan (Bonnier Books, Zaffre)

Awesome Aussies

Sisters in Crime Australia unveile the 2026 Davitt Awards Longlists, culled from 126 books entered across four categories. The judges of the 2026 Davitt Awards have selected a longlist of 28 books that reflect the excellent quality and maturity of stories written by Australian women crime writers. Ruth Wykes, Davitt Awards Judges’ Chair, said the 2026 entries that stood out "were the ones that entertained, challenged, taught us, and stayed with us long after we had read the final chapters. Stories that were bold and brave, or beautifully nuanced." 

Judging continues for the Davitt Awards’ shortlist which will be announced in July, with winners announced in August/September. Voting for the Kerry Greenwood Readers’ Choice Award will commence at another time.

Adult Fiction

• Shaeden Barry, At Café 64, (Echo Publishing)
• Jane Caro, Lyrebird, (Allen & Unwin)
• Shankari Chandran, Unfinished Business, (Ultimo Press)
• Pip Fioretti, Skull River, (Affirm Press)
• Sara Foster, When She Was Gone, (Harper Collins Australia)
• Susan Francis, Revelation Beach, (Wild Dingo Press)
• Zeyneb Gamieldien, Learned Behaviours, (Ultimo Press)
• Fiona Hardy, Unbury The Dead, (Affirm Press)
• Sally Hepworth, Mad Mabel, (Macmillan Australia)
• Elise Janes, The Canvas Killings, (JETT Books)
• Joanna Jenkins, The Bluff, (Allen & Unwin)
• Angie Faye Martin, Melaleuca, (HQ Fiction) Debut
• Laura McCluskey, The Wolf Tree, (Harper Collins Australia) Debut
• Fleur McDonald, The Prospect, (Harper Collins Australia)
• Tanya Scott, Stillwater, (Allen & Unwin) Debut
• Patricia Wolf, Nemesis, (Echo Publishing) 

Non-Fiction

• Sonia Orchard, Groomed, (Simon & Schuster)
• Lucy Sussex & Megan Brown, Outrageous Fortunes, the biography of Mary and Geroge Fortune, (Black Inc Books)
• Kate Wild, The Red House, (Allen & Unwin) 

Young Adult

• Amy Doak, What Have They done to Liza McLean?, (Penguin Randon House Australia)
• Kate Emery, A Murder Is Going Down, (Allen & Unwin)
• Carla Salmon, We Saw What You Started, (Pan Macmillan Australia) Debut 

Children's Books

• Sarah Armstrong, Run, (Hardie Grant Children’s)
• Jacqueline Harvey, The Girl and the Ghost, (Penguin Randon House Australia)
• Amelia Mellor, Oceanforged: The Wicked Ship, (Simon & Schuster Australia)
• Gisela Ervin-Ward, True South, (Midnight Sun) Debut
• Jessica Townsend, Silverborn: The Mystery of Morrigan Crow, (Hachette Children’s)
• Sue Whiting, Promises and Other Lies, (Walker Books)

Media Murder for Monday

It's the start of a new week and that means it's time for a brand-new roundup of crime drama news:


THE BIG SCREEN/MOVIES

Maggie Gyllenhaal will be teaming up once again with Warner Bros. to adapt the Rachel Kushner novel, Creation Lake, with the filmmaker serving as writer, director, and producer. Creation Lake follows a spy who is hired to disrupt a farming collective in France run by environmental activists. But along the way, she begins to question not just her mission but her direction in life in a tale that is described as a philosophical thriller. Released in 2024, Creation Lake was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and longlisted for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.


U.S. production outfit Storiesbound is gearing up to shoot the psychological thriller The Degrees Of Pain with Luna Fujimoto (The Shadow's Edge), Show Kasamatsu (Tokyo Vice), and Takehiro Hira (Shogun) joining the cast. Directed by Donie Ordiales, the project is scheduled to film entirely in Japan by cinematographer Takuro Ishizaka, whose credits include Hikari’s Rental Family, starring Brendan Fraser, which also recently filmed in Japan. The cast of The Degrees Of Pain also includes starring roles for Japanese actress Rila Fukushima and veteran actor-director Naoto Takenaka. The story follows an American writer who travels to Tokyo to be reunited with an actress he’s fallen in love with, only to become entangled with her powerful family and their gatekeepers.


Ryan McParland (Say Nothing), Alfie Allen (Game Of Thrones), Ben Hardy (The Conjuring: Last Rites), and Stacy Martin (The Brutalist) are joining Vincent Cassel and Felicity Jones in the Agatha Christie film Eleven Missing Days. Per the synopsis, "In December 1926, at the height of her fame, Agatha Christie became front-page news when she vanished in bizarre circumstances from her home. In a case of life imitating art, this whodunnit explores the investigation behind her disappearance, strangely resembling an Agatha Christie novel itself where everyone in her life became a suspect." Jones stars as Christie, and Cassel plays a retired Belgian police detective — in an echo of Christie’s most famous sleuth Hercule Poirot — who is drawn into the mysterious real-life case of the Brit author’s disappearance. Bertie Ellwood (Silo) is directing from a screenplay by Ernesto Foronda (Better Luck Tomorrow), based on the book, Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days, by Christie scholar Jared Cade.


Miles Teller (Paper Tiger) has signed on to star in Copperhead, a new thriller from King Ivory helmer John Swab and Black Label Media. Written by Chad Feehan and J. Todd Scott, Copperhead‘s story is set into motion when an undercover drug deal explodes into violence in West Texas. A veteran detective is then forced to team with a young federal agent to unravel the conspiracy within their elite task force.  


TELEVISION/STREAMING

Netflix is developing Hit Man, a series inspired by the 2024 AGC Studios feature that was co-written, produced, and headlined by Glen Powell and co-written, directed and produced by Richard Linklater. Powell and Linklater will executive produce the potential series, which is written by You’re the Worst creator, Stephen Falk. Details about the series haven't been disclosed, but it will likely follow the general premise of the movie about an unassuming police contractor — in this case a college professor — who uses elaborate disguises and develops different characters to pose as a fake hitman and expose suspects looking to get someone killed. The premise is somewhat reminiscent of J.J. Abrams’ ABC spy drama Alias, whose protagonist assumed different identities.


Peacock has picked up The Break-In, a mystery based on the novel of the same title by Katherine Faulkner. The show comes from writer and executive producer Megan Gallagher and Carnival Films, who brought All Her Fault to life last year. The Break-In tells the story of Alice Rathbone, who is the victim of a home invasion. She refuses to accept that the tragic event was simply random and soon finds a trail of dark secrets that spiral closer to home than she ever could have imagined.


Hugh Laurie (House, The Night Manager) has landed a mystery role in his second John le Carré adaptation, the BBC and MGM+’s Legacy of Spies. The series is one of the BBC and MGM+’s biggest budget bets in recent years and is based on 1963’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and the 2017 novel A Legacy of Spies, which itself is a prequel and sequel to The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Laurie joins an ensemble cast including Matthew Macfadyen as legendary spymaster George Smiley, Dan Stevens as the enigmatic Bill Haydon, Felix Kammerer as Hans-Dieter Mundt, and Agnes O’Casey, who reprises her Spy Who Came In From The Cold West End role of Liz Gold. With a third season of Night Manager in the works, this puts Laurie in the rare position of starring in two separate adaptations of an author’s work that could land around the same time.

Hulu’s Only Murders In the Building will be heading to London for it upcoming sixth season, and has booked several English actors as guest stars, including two Doctor Whos, two Harry Potter stars and a Bridgerton standout. Joining Season 6 are David Tennant, Nicola Coughlan, Jodie Whittaker, Jim Broadbent, Richard Ayoade, Adrian Lukis, and Kathryn Hunter. They join recently announced recurring cast Jennifer Saunders, Sean Teale, Simone Ashley, Amar Chadha-Patel, Rhea Norwood, Matthew Beard, Sharon Horgan, Martin Freeman, Geri Halliwell-Horner, Jamie Demetriou, Anjana Vasan, Jane Horrocks, Derek Jacobi, and Lesley Nicol. This marks the first time the comedy mystery series has ventured outside of the U.S., as the crime-solving trio of Charles (Steve Martin), Oliver (Martin Short) and Mabel (Selena Gomez) leaves New York City to investigate London’s newest mystery.


The fourth season of The Night Agent  will find Peter Sutherland and Rose Larkin together again. Luciane Buchanan, who played Peter’s (Gabriel Basso) charge-turned-partner and love interest, Rose, in the first two seasons of the Netflix action drama, will reprise her role in the series finale, although the extent of her presence is unclear. Fans were left disappointed when Buchanan, the female lead opposite Basso in Seasons 1 and 2 of The Night Agent, was not invited back for Season 3, though showrunner Shawn Ryan, who explained the decision with creative reasons, left the door open for her to return in future seasons.


Rupert Everett has signed on to star in the Australian crime drama, Fortitude Valley. The series will be a six-part crime thriller set in Brisbane that "explores family secrets, the corrupting force of power, and the complicated truths behind lies." Everett, recently seen in the Disney+ show Rivals, stars alongside Hunter Page-Lochard (Reckless) and Kat Stewart (Five Bedrooms).


Ryan Murphy's anticipated new series, The Shards, based on Bret Easton Ellis‘s prep school thriller novel, will premiere August 5 on FX and Hulu, as well as Disney+ internationally. The Shards is a dark coming-of-age tale with semi-autobiographical facets for Ellis. Per the official logline: Set against the vivid backdrop of 1980s Los Angeles, the series follows a group of privileged high school seniors at an elite prep school as they navigate identity, sex, jealousy, obsession, and the dangers lurking beneath the surface of American adolescence." Igby Rigney stars as Bret, an aspiring writer and keenly observant teenager whose reality begins to unravel with the arrival of a mysterious and magnetic new student, Robert Mallory (Homer Gere). Transferring in just before his senior year, Robert’s appearance coincides with the growing terror of The Trawler, a serial killer targeting teenagers across the city.  


The BBC has released a first-look trailer for the second season of Ludwig, the cozy crime series starring David Mitchell as a reclusive puzzle-setter-turned detective. Mitchell and Anna Maxwell Martin return to the drama, while Mark Bonnar (Guilt) and Sian Clifford (Fleabag) join the cast as series regulars. Also returning are Dylan Hughes as Henry Betts-Taylor, Dorothy Atkinson as DCS Carol Shaw, Ralph Ineson as Chief Constable Ziegler, and Karl Pilkington as DI Matt Neville. John Taylor (Mitchell) is a reclusive puzzle maker who publishes puzzle books under the pen name "Ludwig." His identical twin brother, James Taylor, is a successful detective chief inspector in the Cambridge police force. James has gone missing, and his wife Lucy (Anna Maxwell Martin), a childhood friend of both brothers, enlists John's help to solve the mystery. Pretending to be his brother, John infiltrates the local police station to investigate; inadvertently, he becomes embroiled in solving other cases.


PODCASTS/RADIO/AUDIO

Tim Shipman welcomed Brad Thor to Spybrary to discuss Choke Point, the 25th Scott Harvath thriller, and the evolution of Scott Harvath from post-9/11 counterterrorism operator.


In the latest Murder Junction episode, Vaseem Khan and Abir Mukherjee chatted with spy fiction and SF writer David Goodman about his multi-award-winning novel, A Reluctant Spy, and its follow-up, Solitary Agents.

 
On the Outliers' Get to Know podcast, hosts DP Lyle and Kathleen Antrim were in conversation with bestselling Jonathan Santlofer, author of The Death Artist, Color Blind, The Killing Art, The Murder Notebook, and Anatomy of Fear.


House of Mystery Radio interviewed Caitlin Rother about Staged, in which investigative reporter Katrina Chopin returns to uncover the secret leaders of a deadly cabal, assisted by the insightful surfing detective, Ken Goode.


My Bookcase Slays welcomed former archaeology student and lifetime history buff, Connie Berry, as she digs into the backstory of her protagonist in the Kate Hamilton Mystery Series.


Bestselling author Robert Bailey stopped by Authors on the Air to discuss his twisty new legal thriller, The Mediator.


On the Pick Your Poison podcast, Dr. Jen Prosser investigated a toxin that has been killing workers since Paleolithic times—and is hiding in modern kitchens. The ancient Romans called it a widow-maker…because husbands died so quickly, some women had as many as seven.

Sunday Music Treat

If you watch a lot of movies and TV, you've probably heard the music of Dmitri Shostakovich and didn't even know it. The Russian composer was was one of the giants of 20th century classical music. Despite his tortured life that pitted him against the Soviet Union, his music lives on in ways he probably couldn't even have imagined (although one of Shostakovich's songs was sung by cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin over the radio from his spacecraft to Mission Control down on earth). You can check out this list of movies/shows that have used his music.

Here's the watlz from the Second Jazz Suite, which was used in Stanley Kubrick's movie Eyes Wide Shut:

And here's the composer himself playing the Andante movement form his Piano Concerto #2, excerpts of which were used most recently in the Cold War film Bridge of Spies starring Tom Hanks:

Quote of the Week

 

Friday's "Forgotten" Books: Shroud of Canvas

Isobel Mary Lambot (1926-2001) was from a family of readers in Birmingham, England, but she didn't turn to writing until 1960. She served first in the Women's Royal Air Force then as a teacher before marrying in 1959 a Belgian engineer whose work took him to Third World countries. That was the launching point for Lambot's travels around the world, experiences that would later turn up in her writing—including her Russian-exile Commissaire Orloff who appeared in two novels and was inspired from a period spent in France. In fact, Lambot's very first crime novel was written in Jamaica, and although never published, it connected her with her literary agent.

In all, she published some 20 crime novels, including police procedurals, political thrillers and standalone detective stories based in such locations as Ceylon and the Congo, translated into German, Italian, Portuguese and Swedish under the Lambot name or the pseudonyms Daniel Ingham and Mary Turner. She also had a nonfiction book, How to Write Crime Novels, published in 1992, taught creative writing, lectured to writers' groups and presented "Whodunit" evenings.

She was definitely of her time and the social mores of the day, once saying, "My aim is to entertain, not to preach, but certain moral values underlie my work all the same. I prefer old-fashioned virtues, such as Crime Does Not Pay, while obviously in real life it does! I don't like the permissive society, and make sure my heroines get decently married at the end. If any of my characters leap into bed with each other, it is essential to the plot, and they usually regret it." But she also understood the writing process well, adding that "People write because they want to. It is an inner compulsion. Crime writers write to entertain, to give a little relaxation in a world of stress. It is very hard work." 

Sadly, late in life as a widow she had rapid onset of Alzheimer's disease and after being moved to a nursing home, left one day and was last seen walking into the countryside. As a family member noted, the author's final mystery was like her novels, as a massive search operation was set up with police and volunteers until her body was found against a tree in Yeld Wood. But she probably would have appreciated the funeral—allegedly, as the hearse drove from the Church in Kington to the Crematorium in Hereford, a lone buzzard flew over the coffin and screeched.

Her novels, such as the 1967 Shroud of Canvas, use a plain straightforward style to good effect, weaving character sketches and interpersonal relationships to help build suspense. The main POV protagonist in "Canvas"  is Rosalind, a young widow with a daughter, who had cut all ties with her family during her first disastrous marriage and has recently married a man she's only known for six months, Geoffrey Lennard, founder of a plastics company.

When Rosalind receives a telephone call from Geoffrey's former fiancée whom Rosalind knew nothing about, it sets in motion a series of mysteries and deaths beginning with the murder of the ex-fiancée in the Lennard garden. As evidence and suspicion begins to mount against Geoffrey, Rosalind's newfound happiness is in jeopardy even as she unwaveringly believes in the innocence of her husband. With the help of a surprising ally, Detective Sergeant Barry Thornley, and his boss, Superintendent Longton, Rosaline pursues the truth, dodging the whispers and doubts from the local community admid a backdrop of industrial espionage and power struggles.

And yet...Rosalind does wonder, as this excerpt indicates, although it also shows Lambot's effective sparse style and how she creates conflict:

There was a nightmare sense of repetition. Was she doomed to sit at the breakfast table each morning waiting for an explanation that never came?...She had wandered round the silent house all evening, waiting for the sound of Geoffrey's car, wishing one moment that Sally was not away for the night, glad at another that she was not there to witness her mother's anxiety.

One in desperation, she had phoned the office but there was no reply. Not that it meant anything. Geoffrey could have told the switchboard not to leave him connected with an outside line, so that he could get on with his work in peace...

But the previous evening he had gone to meet Anne...

Shroud of Canvas may date from the late 60s, but it follows true British Golden Age tradition, filled with skillfully placed clues and red herrings alike and ending with a closed circle of suspects gathered together to hear the revelation of the murderer's identity. And of course, in the end, Crime Does Not Pay.