Mystery Melange

Mystery Readers NorCal is hosting an evening Literary Salon with William Kent Krueger on Thursday, October 6 in Berkeley, CA. Krueger is the author of the Cork O’Connor series set in the north woods of Minnesota and has received Edgar, Anthony, Barry, and Dilys Awards, among many other honors, for his writing. For more information and how to RSVP, check out the Mystery Fanfare blog.

The Iceland Noir festival released the full program for this years event, to be held November 17-20 in Reykjavik. In addition to a full schedule of panels, there will be extra events like the Reykjavík Crimewalk, leaving the Nordic House and ending at Iða Zimsen in downtown Reykjavík, stopping off at criminally significant points along the way with authors reading from their work at each stop. (Crime Fiction Lover has a look at highlights of the festival via this link.)

Writing for Ireland's Independent newspaper, Myles McWeeney posited that female thriller writers are once again dominating the bestseller lists, just as in the Golden Age of crime fiction, with three Irish authors helping to lead the way.

David Hare wrote an essay for The Guardian on the genius of crime fiction author Georges Simenon (1903-1989). Hare is bringing the play The Red Barn, based on Simenon's novel La Main, to the National Stage, and he revealed why he loves the "pithy, power-obsessed creator of Inspector Maigret."

The Crime Fiction Lover blog has been celebrating the best crime fiction of years gone by during this month, a feature they titled "Classics in September." One recent post turned the spotlight on Bloomsbury Reader, a publisher that has been unearthing Golden Age crime fiction and reprinting it for modern audiences, with writers like Margery Allingham, Edmund Crispin and Ann Bridge.

As Martin Edwards notes on his blog, collecting crime fiction has become a bit of "a thing," especially for rare - and often quite expensive - books, like an illustrated copy of Poirot Investigates. He also cites a recent blog post from Panmacmillan about some of the genre’s most sought after items.

Among the intriguing items in the online collection Recollection Wisconsin is the "Sherlock Holmes Mystery Map" (1987) created by Jim Wolnick and Susan Lewis and published by Aaron Blake Publishers. Complete with a "Dancing Men" border, it provides a visual guide to 130 locales in the Holmes canon.  (HT to Elizabeth Foxwell.)

Have you ever wondered how the FBI handled fingerprints before the digital age? By 1943, there were more than 20,000 employees sorting through 70 million fingerprints in an 8,000 square foot facility in the National Guard Armory in Washington D.C., affectionately called the "Fingerprint Factory."

Welcome to the new model of book clubs: silent reading parties where participants gather together just to read the books rather than talk about them.

Maybe they should start such a club for boys. After hearing depressing statistics lately about how boys read less than girls, it's no surprise to have a study find that parents spend 25% less on books for sons than for daughters.

This week's new crime poem at the 5-2 is "Borders" by Aja Beech.

In the Q&A roundup, Graeme Macrae Burnet talked with the Wall Street Journal about his book that was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction, His Bloody Project, which revolves around a triple murder in a quiet crofting community in 1860s Scotland; the Mystery People welcomed Beth Lewis to chat about her debut novel, the psychological thriller, The Wolf Road; Karin Slaughter spoke with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution about the new book in her series with GBI agent Will Trent and why it's been three years since the last installment; and Chris Holm stopped by the MP blog to discuss his new novel in the series with Michael Hendricks, a hit man who kills other hitmen.