Mystery Melange

The annual National Book Festival, sponsored by the Library of Congress, heads to the nation's capital this Saturday for a free one-day event at the Washington Convention Center. This year's festivities will include appearances by Stephen King, Carl Hiaasen, and Harlan Coben.

Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year, but as as editor Janet Hutchings notes on the EQMM blog, this year also marks another milestone - the Private Eye Writers of America is celebrating its 35th anniversary. Author, editor, critic, and recent PWA vice-president, Ted Fitzgerald, wrote a guest post for the blog about the organization and its storied history. 

Crime writer Agatha Christie's murder mystery novels are getting a new outing - as stamps. The Royal Mail in the UK has issued six stamps to mark the centenary of the year Christie wrote her first detective novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, which introduced Belgian detective Hercule Poirot to the world. But these aren't just ordinary stamps - they contain hidden clues and references, printed in special inks and microtext, to murders and key scenes in Christie's most famous novels. Amateur sleuths will be able to use UV light, body heat and a magnifying glass to uncover hidden elements and key scenes in the stamps.

Speaking of Dame Agatha, Bookbub staffer Chanel Cleeton compiled a list of  "11 New Mysteries to Read if You Love Agatha Christie."

Agatha Christie has been getting quite a bit of press this year, thanks to the 125 anniversary of her birth. But there's another author celebrating a big anniversary, Mary Stewart, and just in the nick of time comes a forgotten novella that The Guardian calls "the perfect celebration of her centenary year."

Author Ann Cleeves has written a murder mystery script for libraries and booksellers to use in "author-less" events, as a way of thanking librarians and booksellers for their support during her career and also an acknowledgement of the funding gap left by cuts to libraries that can make such public events and outreach work difficult or impossible. The murder mystery script, Blood on the Bannocks, will equip public libraries with everything they need to hold murder mystery nights for readers.  

Fans of noir crime comics should check out this piece by Maika Keuben for Dirge Magazine.

This Tokyo-based Japanese craftsman brings old books back to life by making them look brand new through techniques obtained after more than three decades of experience in his shop from the Suidobashi area of Japan’s capital. Okano, the old Japanese craftsman, can reverse almost any deterioration process that a book has witnessed, bringing back the joy of reading old novels and stories to anyone who visits his repair shop.

Turns out, it's a good week for "old" things:  Melville House celebrated the "oldest book in the Americas," while word came that the world's oldest library, Morrocco's Khizanat al-Qarawiyyin, is set to reopen after a complete restoration.

Listverse takes a tour into "10 Creepy Mysteries Involving Abandoned Vehicles."

The featured crime poem at the 5-2 this week is "The Porn-Phone Caper" by Paula Willis.

In the Q&A roundup, Zoe Sharp visited with The Mystery People to talk about her latest book featuring Kelly Jacks, a former Crime Scene Investigator turned crime scene cleaner; the MPs also welcomed Mike McCrary, whose new book, Genuinely Dangerous, is about a failed writer-director who decides to restart his career by embedding himself with a gang of bank robbers; and Frances McNamara stopped by Omnimystery News to chat about her sixth mystery featuring amateur sleuth Emily Cabot, Death at the Paris Exposition.