Mystery Melange

Walter Mosley has been chosen as the 2016 Grand Master by Mystery Writers of America (MWA), an honor that represents the pinnacle of achievement in mystery writing. The MWA also announced the Raven Award for outstanding achievement in the mystery field outside the realm of creative writing, with two honorees this year, editor and scholar Margaret Kinsman, and Sisters in Crime. Also announced was the the Ellery Queen Award, established in 1983 to honor “outstanding writing teams and outstanding people in the mystery-publishing industry," which will be handed out to Janet Rudolph, editor of the Mystery Readers Journal.

Wordharvest Writing Contests announced that the Tony Hillerman Prize for Best First Mystery Novel was awarded to The Homeplace by by Kevin Wolf, which will be published by St. Martin’s Press in September 2016. The Tony Hillerman Mystery Short Story winner was Robert E. Evans for "A Simple Thing, Rather Elegant."

The Santa Barbara Independent profiled "Ross Macdonald at 100: The Rediscovery of Santa Barbara’s Greatest Writer."

This year is the 50th anniversary of Truman Capote's celebrated In Cold Blood, and the Sydney Morning Herald's Andrew Stephens delved into the topic of true crime dramas in both book and media forms, asking, "why do we sit spellbound as humans do their worst?"

The BBC took a look at a new book that explores the life and career of secretive Inverness mystery writer Elizabeth Mackintosh, who died in 1952. Mackintosh was one of the UK's most successful novelists and playwrights but is better known by her pen-names including Josephine Tey and Gordon Daviot.

The Washington Review of Books profiled the new scholarly work, The Legendary Detective: The Private Eye in Fact and Fiction, by John Walton, a professor of sociology at the University of California-Davis. As the author states, "This is a study of American society and culture that reveals how the detective business arose, fashioning its own fictions, in tandem with a culture industry that was constrained by commercial fact, each a piece of the larger political economy and both subject to an essential interplay."

Another new book on private detectives was discussed in the Wall Street Journal with a look at The Legendary Detective by John Walton and its take on the private eye in fact and fiction.

Author-educator Andy Martin shadowed crime fiction author Lee Child to observe the creative process all the way from the first word (“Moving”) to the last (“needle”), and the result is an interactive Q&A for the New York Times and the new book Reacher Said Nothing: Lee Child and the Making of Make Me.

A look at the latest journal reviews of crime fiction includes Declan Hughes writing for the The Irish times and offering up new books by Michael Connelly, Ian Rankin, Robert Galbraith, and Sarah Weinman.

This week's featured crime poem at the 5-2 is "Again one hand" by Simon Perchik.

In the Q&A roundup, father-son duo of Jonathan and Jesse Kellerman talk about collaborating for the first time on the novel The Golem of Hollywood; Karla M. Hull stopped by Omnimystery News to discuss her new first in series mystery, A Sip of Death; Sons of Spade welcomed S.W. Lauden, a prolific short-story author whose debut novel, Bad Citizen Corporation, has just been published; The CBC chatted with crime writer Ian Rankin about his new novel Even Dogs in the Wild; and The Mystery People snagged Eric Beetner in a Q&A about his new novel The Rumrunners.