Mystery Melange

September is Agatha Christie Month, with what would have been her 120th birthday falling on September 15. Janet Rudolph posted a nice overview on her blog, Mystery Fanfare, including links to a Christie blog carnival and the Barnes & Noble birthday party with lots of guest bloggers taking part.

Barbara Corrado Pope, the author of Cezanne's Quarry will join Mystery Readers NorCal's Litrary Salon series on Wednesday, September 15, to discuss her new book, The Blood of Lorraine. To reserve your spot, RSVP to janet@mysteryreaders.org

Mystery Scene is promoting their fall issue, which will feature interviews with Kathy Reichs, creator of  forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan, and author William Kent Krueger, long known as a "writer's writer." Other articles look at a Sherlock Holmes pastiche via Nancy Springer's Enola Holmes YA novels, and there will be reviews of the best of fall's new books. Editor Kate Stine also pointed out that her first issue coincided with the one-year anniversary of the September 11th attacks and offered essays from several crime writers, including SJ Rozan's contribution, "My New York," now available on the Mystery Scene website.

Elizabeth Foxwell, editor of Clues, a Journal of Detection, has a roundup of that publication's latest edition. Highlights include Hilary A. Goldsmith writing on Darwinian echoes in Conan Doyle; Clare Clarke dicsussing Arthur Morrison's Horace Dorrington, criminal-detective; Christine Photinos on whether Cornell Woolrich can be considered a member of the US hard-boiled school; Laura Vorachek on Vera Caspary's rewriting of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862) in Bedelia (1945); Patricia Gaitely on the supernatural in James Lee Burke; and Lisanne Sauerwald's analysis of Russian absurdist writer Daniil Kharms (1905–42), who was so enamored of Sherlock Holmes that he dressed like an English gentleman and encoded Holmes's Russian name, Kholms, into his pseudonym, Kharms.

It's time again for National Public Radio's Three-Minute Fiction writing contest. Stories can't be longer than 600 words and it must open with the line: "Some people swore that the house was haunted" and end with the line "Nothing was ever the same again after that."

The Independent had a feature this week about the wonderful (and colorful) world of pulp fiction covers. Ed Jaster, senior vice-president of Heritage Auctions, presided over an auction of original versions of art often seen on the covers of 20-cent fiction titles. As Jaster explained, "The appeal lies in the lack of subtlety. It is the art of the masses. It exists outside the conventional artistic boundaries, yet it elicits this visceral reaction. The women are beautiful, the men are handsome. There's sex appeal, danger, good and evil."

Take heart, oh ye authors sporting crow's feet and a few gray hairs. The Huffington Post offered up 41 authors with a debut novel over the age of 40, as a way of counteracting a recent article in the Guardian featuring young authors and stating that "Let's Face It, After 40, You're Past It."

Actor Kevin McCarthy, best known as the star of the 1956 science fiction movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, died this past week at the age of 96. Crime fiction author Ed Gorman worked with Kevin writing a book about the actor's early days with Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift and starting the early version of The Actors' Studio, as well as McCarthy's work on the Body Snatchers movie. Ed has a nice tribute on his web site.