Looks like CrimeFest is going to be an annual event henceforth. Originally designed to be biannual, recent success like the June 5-8 event this year made the organizers reconsider that schedule and so the festival will return next year, from May 14-17. Thriller writer Meg Gardiner will be the 2009 Toastmistress, and one of the featured guest authors will be Simon Brett.

Guy Ritchie has signed on to a new Sherlock Holmes movie, although early plans make it sound like something purists might not approve. The Hollywood Reporter says "The concept sees the character be more adventuresome and less stuffy than previous screen incarnations and mines on more obscure character traits."

Clues Magazine, the only U.S. academic journal on crime fiction, is moving to a new publisher, McFarland & Co. of Jefferson, North Carolina, after the former owner sold it. As Managing Editor Elizabeth Foxwell explains, Clues "is a good match for McFarland, which has a strong popular culture line, including mystery reference works."

Not too long ago, the Times Online had a piece about collecting crime fiction, in which author Nigel Williams stated that detective fiction is probably the most avidly collected section of the modern second-hand first- edition market. Williams advises against collecting as an investment per se, since demand can vary depending upon various factors. Dick Francis's 60s books are valuable, but after the mid-70s he had print runs of 10-50,000, so those books have little value. Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White in its original binding would be around $13,000 US. Later reprints are less expensive: a good-quality early reprint of The Hound of the Baskervilles would only sell for $116 US. Williams goes on to add that modern writers are collectible too, as a first edition of the first Ian Rankin novel is a four-figure book.

Atlanta's Sunday Paper had a recent Q&A with John Connolly. In it, Connolly admits "There is a difficulty in being a genre novelist; as you achieve an amount of success, there’s pressure to repeat that success, to do pretty much the same thing. Having done Nocturne, it’s never going to sell in the kind of quantities that the Parker novels will sell in. You’re not going to make that much money that year. I recognize this dependence I have on a certain readership, and sometimes that comes into conflict with the desire to take chances."