Mystery Melange

The Love is Murder conference announced the finalists of the Lovey Awards in various categories. Janet Rudolph posted an at-a-glance listing on Mystery Fanfare.

The application deadline for the Helen McCloy/MWA scholarship is coming up on February 28. The award is intended to nurture talent in mystery writing (fiction, nonfiction, playwriting and screenwriting) and to offset tuition and fees for writing classes, seminars and writing programs. You don't have to be a member of MWA to apply. For more information and how to apply, check out the Mystery Writers of American website.

The Guardian's Book Club will feature novelist John Banville discussing Raymond Chandler’s iconic private detective, Philip Marlowe on February 5 at London's The Tabernacle.

Peter Porco, writing for the Alaska Dispatch News, penned an essay about a then-Cpl. Dashiell Hammett during WWII and his time spent in the Aluetians working on the newspaper The Adakian for the troops. His paper "gave its readers more news of the war than military readers at other posts got and delivered it to them a lot sooner."

Author and librarian Rob Lopresti has started a new crime fiction blog he's calling "Today in Mystery History."

The multi-author blog Mystery Lovers Kitchen has added a new blogger to their roster, Leslie Budewitz, who writes the Food Lovers Village Mysteries.

Hat tip to Clare Toohey for taking note of the brand-new anthology 10-CODE, the first collection of stories written by real-life cops honoring officers killed in the line of duty. All proceeds benefit the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund in Washington, D.C.

Marilynne Robinson wrote an essay on Edgar Allan Poe for The New York Review of Books, calling "a turbulence, an anomaly among the major American writers of his period, an anomaly to this day."

James Patterson is offering up a special edition of his new novel Private Vegas: it will include a five-course dinner with the author, gold binoculars – and a very limited time to read it because it will self-destruct 24 hours after the purchaser starts reading. And all you need is to bid on this offer is $300,000.

You can grab the latest issue of All Due Respect for your Kindle. Editors Chris Rhatigan and Mike Monson have gathered new noir stories from Steve Weddle, Joe Sinisi, Paul Brazill, Gabino Iglesias, Angel Luis Colón, Garnett Elliott, and Keith Rawson.

Fans of print books will rejoice to hear a Nielsen BookScan survey found unit sales of print books in the U.S. rose 2.4 percent in 2014, an increase largely driven by retail and club sales, which were up 3.4 percent last year. The UK's Waterstones bookstore chain also reported an increase in print book sales last year.

We lost another mystery author too soon, with the death of Sharon Zukowski, who was only 60. She authored several mystery novels, including a series featuring private investigator Blaine Stewart.

The latest crime poem at the 5-2 is "Up and Down at the Empire State Building" by Bruce Harris.

The Q&A roundup includes W.E.B. Griffin chatting with the Huffington Post, who has published over 40 lilitary and detective fiction novels (under that name), about his latest work The Assassination Option; British poet and mystery novelist Sophie Hannah stopped by the Huffington Post to discuss her latest book The Carrier; other HuffPo guests included Tami Hoag, talking about her new work, Cold Cold Heart, and James Grippando, chatting about his new legal thriller, Cane and Abe; Danish crime writer Jakob Melander stopped by Nordic Style Magazine with a behind-the-scenes look at his debut novel, The House That Jack Built; and Mette Ivie Harrison was snared by The Mystery People to talk about her novel The Bishop’s Wife, which is the MP January Pick of the Month.