Mystery Melange

 

Marcus Sakey offered his Top 5 Favorite Movies on the Chicago Collective Blog, reprinted in the Chicago Trib.

Michael Connelly is fresh off his appearance as part of the Thurber House "Evenings With Authors" series. He paused long enough for a Q&A with the Columbus Dispatch, saying "I don't have a complaint about how the crime novel is viewed. It's largely responsible for keeping book publishing in business. I think it garners professional respect from the business angle. I think more and more, . . . it's harder and harder to write a story or a book about American society that doesn't have crime in it."

Another Chicago paper, the Sun-Times, profiled Lori Andrews, a law professor who has authored 13 books, most of them non-fiction works about biotechnology and genetics. But she's also written three mysteries, all of which feature her high-tech sleuth, geneticist Alexandra Blake. she said, "When it comes to [biotechnology] policy, people's eyes glaze over. They don't think they are entitled to an opinion," said Andrews, who also is director of the Institute for Science, Law and Technology at the Illinois Institute of Technology. "When they can see the technology set in a mystery novel and see how greed and policy and emotion play out, people really get enraged."

Here are a couple of crime writing news tidbits from East Tennessee, since I hail from them thar parts. Criminal Brief wrote about Louis Willis, who retired after 42 years of government service and then earned his master’s degree in English literature from the University of Tennessee. A voracious reader and fan of various genres, including crime fiction, he’s writing a nonfiction book which will be a critical analysis of black mystery writers "before shuffling off to the Great Library" in the Sky. And the East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame just inducted four new writers, including David Hunter, nominated for an Edgar for his first mystery novel, The Jigsaw Man.

In 2009, the U.S. Postal Service will mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of poet and mystery writer Edgar Allan Poe and will unveil a new Poe stamp January 16 in Richmond, Vorginia. Look for a large spate of other Poe celebrations coming up next year.

The Independent included a pair of reviews recently of Japanese noir writer Natsuo Kirino, one reviewing her book Grotesque and the other Real World (both books in translation), adding that "Western stereotypes of Japanese femininity take a battering in the fiction of Natsuo Kirino – a crime writer who has placed some decidedly non-submissive female protagonists at the heart of her noirish thrillers."

How many crime fiction authors do you hear who schedule a prison as a stop on their book tour? Surprisingly few (prisoners tend not to have a lot of money to buy books, after all). But thriller writer and former SAS sergeant Chris Ryan is doing just that at Risley prison in the UK as part of the 2008 National Year of Reading.