Mystery Melange

The Australian Crime Writers Association handed out their annual Ned Kely Awards last week. The award for Best Fiction went to Blackwattle Creek by Geoffrey McGeachin; Zane Lovitt won the prize for Best First Fiction for The Midnight Promise; the nod for True Crime went to The People Smuggler by Robin de Crespigny; and the Sandra Harvey Award for Short Fiction was won by Roger Vickery.

Actress Angela Lansbury has had a long and varied career in film, television and the theater, but to many fans in the crime fiction community, she'll always be Jessica Fletcher on Murder She Wrote. On November 16, she'll join Steve Martin and Piero Tosi in being presented with Honorary Academy Awards during the 5th annual Governors Awards ceremony at the Hollywood & Highland
Center. The awards pay tribute to individuals "who've made indelible contributions in their respective fields."

Shotgun Honey is out with its second anthology of short crime fiction, titled RELOADED: Both Barrels Vol. 2. There are offerings from 25 writers of crime, noir and hard boiled fiction. You can download the ebook version or grab a paperback copy right here.

The week, Gerald So's 5-2 Crime Poetry ezine celebrates the start of its third year with Hartford, Connecticut teacher Tiffany Washington reading her poem "Day 7."

Needle magazine is open for submissions again. I was fortunate to work with Steve Weddle on the Winter 2012 issue with one of my stories and attest that this is a terrific market for dark crime and noir stories (averaging around 2,500 words each).

Dynamite Entertainment is publishing a five-issue comic featuring Sherlock Holmes's arch-nemesis Professor James Moriarty in Sherlock Holmes: Moriarty Lives, written by crime novelist David Liss and illustrated by Daniel Indro. As Liss said, "I've always liked the idea of taking a villain and turning him into the hero of the story, just getting a
different perspective." The first issue comes out in December of this year. (Hat tip to Omnimystery News.)

The first all-digital library in the U.S. opens this week. The BiblioTech Digital Library in San Antonio, Texas, wil have six hundred e-readers and over ten thousand eBooks available at first. The library is based in a predominately Hispanic, low-income neighborhood, where 75% of the population lacks Internet access,

If you've been waiting for a Netflix for ebooks, the new venture Oyster wants to help—at least, eventually. In the short term, it's invitation only, with limited offerings available on only one platform (Apple). It remains to be seen how the program will fare as it continues to develop, but it's something to keep an eye on.

The Q&A roundup this week includes Kate Quinn, who joins Mystery Lovers' Kitchen to talk about her historical series detailing the early years of the Borgia clan and offers up a peach dish borrowed from a
Renaissance menu.

Is all the talk about NSA invasive spying on Americans making you nervous? If you're in New York this month, hop on over to the New Museum. They opened a temporary Privacy
Gift Shop featuring clothing and
accessories that protect against various methods of surveillance.