Mystery Melange

The 13th edition of the Crime on the Beach Festival in Le Havre starts today and will host illustrators, artists, actors, and French and international crime novelists.

Tomorrow night in Glasgow (June 11), a Noir at the Bar event will be held at the Raven bar on Renfield Street at 7pm. Authors who will be reading from their works include Denise Mina (The Red Road), Christopher Brookmyre (Dead Girl Walking), Helen Fitzgerald (The Exit), Kirstin Innes (Fishnet) and Graeme MacRae Burnet (The Disappearance of Adele Bedeau).

The International Crime Fiction Research Group will hold its next conference June 26-27 at the University of Limerick. Titled "Consuming Crime," the event will include sessions on Crime and the Media, Food in Crime Fiction, and a look at consumption in the genre.

The Bloody Scotland conference announced the lineup for its fourth annual event this September. Highlights will include an all-woman panel of writers tackling the topic, "Killer Women – Deadlier Than The Male?"; a celebration of the 125th anniversary of Agatha Christie’s birth with talks by research chemist Dr Kathryn Harkup (whose book A is for Arsenic looks at Christie's obsession with poison), and Icelandic author Ragnar Jonasson, who's translated 14 of Christie’s books; writers and comics will join forces to improvise the plot of a crime novel on stage; and the event culminates with the Bloody Scotland Crime Book of the Year awards dinner. The Conference also announced it's giving away free tickets to the unemployed.

A record 96 crime books are in the running for Sisters in Crime Australia's 15th Davitt Awards, with finalists to be presented by at a gala dinner in Melbourne on Saturday, August 29.

BritCrime 2015 is a free online festival taking July 11-13, featuring live Q&A panel discussions with forty crime authors hosted on Facebook, as well as informal "Meet us in the bar" sessions for late night chat, giveaways, and more. The festival will provide updates from BritCrime authors attending New York’s ThrillerFest, as well as a look ahead to Theakston’s Old Peculiar Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate the following week, where many BritCrime authors will be in attendance.

A new free online course from Dundee University's Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification (CAHID) takes its inspiration from a crime novel by author Val McDermid. Interested students can register for the "Identifying the Dead" course, which begins in September, and will "pick their way through the plot, which will unfold over six weeks and require them to solve the mysteries presented by the dead body. They will be presented with pieces of evidence and video footage around the case."

For more than a century, the Crime Museum inside London police headquarters has been available only to Scotland Yard staff and invited guests. That will change this October when hundreds of objects from the museum will be part of exhibition at the Museum of London, including the death masks of executed murderers, a pistol used in an attempt to kill Queen Victoria, and notes from a senior detective on the 1888 Jack the Ripper murders.

Also in London, you can catch the exhibition "A Dickens Whodunit: Solving The Mystery of Edwin Drood," at the Charles Dickens Museum through November 22. The exhibition is curated by Dickens specialist Pete Orford (University of Buckingham) and features clips from adaptations of Dickens novels and also discussions of various theories about the perpetrator in Dickens's unfinished work. Visitors can also see the desk on which Dickens wrote Drood. (HT to Elizabeth Foxwell, a/k/a The Bunburyist Blog)

Inkitt is a Germany-based website similar to Wattpad where writer-members can read and share short fiction in a variety of genres. They also sponsor the occasional short story contest, and the latest is for mystery and thriller authors. The rules are pretty simple: submit original short stories of any length on the theme of "Fated Paradox: Tales of gripping suspense" from now through July 4th. Reader votes will determine the top tier, with the Inkitt staff choosing the first, second, and third prize winners.

This week's crime poem over at the 5-2 is "Love Me Like a Murder Scene" by Sara J. Tantlinger.

The Q&A roundup includes an Examiner interview with Kate Carlisle about the new bibliophile mystery; Gerald So chats with Patti Abbott about her debut novel, Concrete Angel; Chris Culver stopped by Omnimystery News to talk about his latest Ash Rashid mystery; Jeffery Deaver talked with Hot Press about how he got into writing and how a stalking incident inspired his third Kathryn Dance novel; and Peter James told the The Telegraph about his fascination with murder and how a burglary led to his new novel You Are Dead.