Mystery Melange

Noir at the Bar, the long-running live literary event that combines crime fiction, cocktails, and live performance, returns to the Yonder Bar in downtown Hillsborough, North Carolina, tonight, July 16 at 7:00 p.m. Hosted by longtime emcee Tracey Reynolds, the evening will feature live readings from an all-star lineup of acclaimed authors including Eryk Pruitt, S.A. Cosby, Linda Sands, Jen Conley, Russell Johnson, Morgan Sullivan, Nathan Kotecki, and Isaac Hughes Green. Part literary reading, part variety show, and part community gathering, Noir at the Bar gives each author eight minutes to entertain the audience with original fiction, stories, and excerpts. “This is our seventh year in business and Noir at the Bar is what makes it all worth it to me,” said Eryk Pruitt, co-owner of Yonder and author of five crime novels. “I’ve dedicated nearly my whole life to introducing readers and writers to each other and there is no greater privilege than to do it here.” Click here for more information.


The Book Passage Mystery Writers Conference returns to Corte Madera, CA, this weekend. Writers will host panels with tips on classes on setting, dialogue, and character development, while editors, agents, and publishers tell participants what they need to know to get published. Other panels feature detectives, forensic experts, prosecutors, defense lawyers and crime-fighting professionals sharing their expertise and helping writers bring realism to their work. Authors taking part include co-chairs Cara Black and Tim Maleeny, as well as Matt Coyle, Samantha Downing, Hallie Ephron, George Fong, Elizabeth George, Rachel Howzell Hall, Laurie R. King, James L'Etoile, Audrey Lee, Ritu Mukerji, Bill Petrocelli, Lisa Scottoline, Luisa Smith, and Kelli Stanley.


The Talking Volumes series, sponsored by the Minnesota Star Tribune and Minnesota Public Radio, announced their fall lineup which will take place at the new home of the O’Shaughnessy at St. Catherine University. Participants will include British mystery novelist Lucy Foley, who will talk about Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel, in which she brings back Agatha Christie’s elderly sleuth Miss Marple (Foley was selected by Christie’s estate to create new books). Foley will be at the O’Shaughnessy at 7 p.m. Sept. 25. Emily St. John Mandel will appear on November 4th to talk about her near-future psychological thriller, Exit Party. And on November 11, Colson Whitehead will be the featured speaker, discussing Cool Machine, which concludes his “Harlem Trilogy” about the adventures of a conman who is trying to go straight.


Registration is now open for ShortCon 2027, which will return to Elaine's in Alexandria, Virginia, on Saturday, June 5, 2027. Presenters include Reed Farrel Coleman, Linda Landrigan, Libby Cudmore, and Tom Milani. Registration includes a day filled with useful information specifically for writers of short crime fiction as well as a full breakfast and lunch. Learn more and register via this link.

 
Art Taylor's "The First Two Pages" blog featured an essay by Jessica Slee about her story, ”Woodpeckers,” from Shotgun Honey Presents: Thicker Than Water , edited by Ron Earl Phillips.


This week's crime poem up at the 5-2 Crime Poetry Weekly is "A Man Dredged a River" by Kate Ladew.


In the Q&A roundup, Iceland-based author Erlendur Arason spoke with Crime Fiction Lover about his new thriller, Hotel Manager’s Guide to Murder; and Ryan Pote chatted with Deborah Kalb about his new thriller, The Ghost City, a sequel to his novel, Blood and Treasure, featuring professional treasure hunter and adventurer Ethan Cain.

Author R&R with Natasha Díaz

Natasha Díaz is an award-winning author and screenwriter currently residing in Brooklyn, NY. Natasha’s scripts have been developed at FX and Disney. Her essays can be found in The Establishment and Huffington Post. She is an anthology contributor to Wild Tongues Can’t be Tamed, For the Rest of Us, and instant USA Today bestselling Black Girl Power. Natasha coauthored two novels told in stories, The Grimoire of Grave Fates and House Party. Her debut novel, Color Me In, was released in 2019, and her sophomore novel, the YA mystery What Lies Beneath the Flowers, was released this week.

"It" girl Estella Aubergine is everything Pippa and Bidi are not: wealthy, popular, influential...and missing. Finding her and collecting the reward money that Estella’s reclusive mother is offering could turn their lives around. They’d be able to pay off the overdue bills on Pippa’s family’s store, and all the media attention would only help Bidi’s chances of becoming the youngest elected official in San Francisco. 

But to uncover what happened to Estella, they’ll have to enter her wealthy world. Namely, the prestigious Beaumont Academy, where Estella’s classmates and teachers all seem to have dark secrets and enough money to hide them. 

The deeper Pippa and Bidi dig, the more questions come up about Estella’s disappearance. Worse, someone seems to be clocking their every step. And as cracks form in the girls’ friendship, they begin to see that maybe the grass isn’t always greener on the other side.

Diaz stops by In Reference to Murder to take some Author R&R about writing the book:

 

The idea for What Lies Beneath the Flowers, started off with my editor suggesting I do a retelling of Great Expectations. It was an interesting idea, but the issue was, I had never read Great Expectations, so I set to the task of reading five hundred and forty-four pages. (A fun fact I learned along the way was that Dickens wrote the story in a serial format, each week a new chapter was published, and he was paid by the word, so he was incentivized to write as many as possible.) 

As this was the source material, reading the book was an essential type of research, but it was also unique. I don’t often read a book with intent of dissecting the pieces I like best to remix into my own version. This time, reading a book also meant trying to capture the rhythms of Charles Dickens’ writing. I tried to pay attention to his style as much as the story. I tried to fill in the gaps where the world he created and the one I know didn’t overlap. 

Aside from reading the actual book, the second most important research I did was about flowers and plants. For that, I went through a bunch of flower books and read about flowers that caught my eye and took notes, so I had a little log of options. Otherwise, if I came to a moment where Pippa needed to lean on her knowledge of flowers to help get her through a situation and nothing in my log worked, I would search for a flower or plant that experienced a similar conflict in their lifespan. A lot of times, I was able to find as close to a parallel scenario as possible for a certain floral species and then use that information in the story.

You can learn more about Natasha Díaz via her website and Substack and follow her on Instagram and Goodreads.