Tuesday, February 24, 2009

The International(s)

 

UN_Flag Karen Meek over at EuroCrime compiled listings of upcoming African crime fiction which you can peruse here and here. She's particularly looking forward to Malla Nunn's A Beautiful Place to Die.

On the Detectives Beyond Borders blog, Peter Rozovsky profiled Adrian Hyland (Diamond Dove) who was near the Australian wildfires recently. Although he and his family survived, they lost friends in the disaster.

The Arab News reviewed "a rare thriller from the Arab world," M.M. Tawfik's Murder in the Tower of Happiness. As the article points out, crime fiction is not only not popular in Arabic literature, among a number of Arab writers and scholars it's not even considered a noble genre.

John Sullivan of The Winnipeg Free Press was pleased to see that the country's "mysterian underclass" has produced a trio of news releases, two of them "shockingly world-class."

In the Philippines, Manilla Bulletin writer Kristel Autencio has started a new crime fiction blog, So Fedorable.

A new anthology of South African crime writing titled Bad Company (Pan Macmillan) will be released soon. It's a collection of stories by some of South Africa’s best writers and it edited by Joanne Hichens.

Arminta Wallace, with the Irish Times, offers her take on why Irish crime fiction writers are "suddenly" popular when there was a "time when Irish writers of the criminal persuasion were rarer than root canal work on a hen."

Whither Indian detectives? Bangalore-based writer Lakshmi Chaudhry wonders if the dearth is due to the overwhelming dominance of Western writers? Or perhaps it’s hard to imagine an Indian policeman who triumphs not only over the killer but also the incompetence and corruption around him. "It’s been a long futile search for an answer," says author Satyajit Ray.