Mystery Melange

The crime fiction community lost one of its own last week when author, editor, and blogger Ed Gorman died following a long battle with cancer. Ed penned dozens of mystery novels, including the Sam McCain, Jack Dwyer and Dev Conrad series. Tributes have been pouring in since about Ed's decency and his tireless support for and encouragement of newbie authors. You can read some of those tributes via The Rap Sheet, Bill Crider, Mike Stotter, Todd Mason, James Reasoner, Mystery Fanfare, and the Cedar Rapids Gazette. If you'd like to celebrate Ed's life and literary legacy, the Mystery File has an extensive bibliography, and Beat to a Pulp is featuring one of Ed's stories, titled "Stalker."

Sadly, mystery author Larry Karp also died this past week. Karp was the author of medical thrillers and novels based on music, especially ragtime, and lived in the Puget Sound region of Washington State. Puget Sound's Sisters in Crime chapter had a tribute on Facebook.

The Noir at the Bar events are coming at a fast and furious pace, which means I sometimes miss a few. But this one looks particularly fun, to be held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on November 3 and hosted by Night Owl Mysteries and Crimespree Magazine. The featured authors scheduled to appear include Dana Camera, Matthew Clemens, Ed Kurtz, Nicholas Petrie, Todd Robinson, and Johnny Shaw. Plus, in honor of this Noir at the Bar also being the launch for the Crimespree beer, Cherry Moon, everyone buying a Cherry Moon during the event will get a free hardcover book with their beer.

Irish crime writers Alan Glynn and Declan Hughes will take part in a commemoration of Raymond Chandler's Waterford connections at the city's annual Imagine Arts Festival on October 23, reading from their work and discussing Chandler's influence on their writing and contemporary crime fiction.  

Last week, the CWA handed its annual Dagger Awards, with Bill Beverly's novel Dodgers being the big winner, awarded both the Goldsboro Gold for the best crime novel and John Creasey New Blood for the best debut crime novel. Don Winslow's The Cartel was also honored with the Ian Fleming Steel for the best crime thriller of the year. For the full list of winners, check out the Eurocrime blog or the official CWA website.

Book Riot is celebrating the launch of its new biweekly newsletter for all things mystery and thriller, Unusual Suspects, with a giveaway open through October 23 (the winner will receive 10 new mystery and thriller releases). Unusual Suspects will include crime fiction news, reviews, and interviews, with the first issue scheduled for November.

In honor of its 75th anniversary, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine recently held an anniversary symposium. For those of you who weren't able to attend, EQMM has since made the video and audio from the first panel available online, and you can read more about the celebration via Vicki Weisfeld's piece for Crime Fiction Lover.

Forty years ago, music writer Paul Nelson interviewed the iconic crime fiction author Ross Macdonald (a/k/a Kenneth Millar), creator of one of the most famous fictional private eye in literary history, Lew Archer. Their interaction resulted in forty hours of interviews that have been collected into a book by Kevin Avery and Jeff Wong, and LitHub arranged for Avery to speak with one of Macdonald's surviving friends, New York Times bestselling writer Jonathan Lethem, about Macdonald and how the book came together.  

Ahead of Halloween, the AMC Network is celebrating the 20th anniversary of FearFest, one of TV’s longest-running annual thematic programming celebrations. As part of the big bash, the network will offer the largest collection of horror and genre film titles in its history.

For the next two weekends, Genesee Country Village & Museum will bring some of Edgar Allan Poe's wonderfully creepy tales to life with its Spirits of the Past theatrical tours. Using the historic village as its canvas, this 75-minute, all-new theatrical tour revisits chilling scenes from such works as "The Tell-Tale Heart," "Berenice," "The Pit and the Pendulum," "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether" and others. Costumed guides lead visitors by candlelight through the village where they encounter short vignettes in and around the historic homes.

Strand Magazine compiled a listing of "Ten Great Books by Up-and-Coming Crime Fiction Writers," from traditional hard-boiled to pulpy southern noir to "drug dealers doing battle with inhuman gangbangers."

Lithub profiled "the man who invented bookselling as we know it," James Lackington. If you've ever bought a remaindered book at deep discount, or wandered through the over-stocked shelves of a cavernous bookstore, or spent an afternoon lounging in the reading area of a bookshop, then you’ve experienced some of the ways that Lackington revolutionized bookselling in the late 18th century.

Author Louise Millar talked about the "The creepy truth about b
eing a female crime writer" for the Telegraph.

Placing Literature has created two new digital interactive literary maps: Charles Dickens and Sherlock Holmes. Site visitors can follow the adventures of Oliver Twist or Edwin Drood in Victorian London and see the locations that the Baker Street detective visited in his stories. The website has been creating literary maps since 2013 and has already created maps for Mark Twain, Dylan Thomas, New York City, and others, with more than 3,600 literary places of interest mapped on its site.

Really neat idea: at one store in Ypsilanti, a working-class town just outside Ann Arbor, Michigan, kids get a $2 discount if they read a book aloud to their barber.

Hopefully, you'll get to see them in person, but in the meantime, here's your chance to peek inside some truly famous bookshops.

This week's featured crime poem over at the 5-2 is "Midnight Preparation" by Michael Arnzen.

In the Q&A roundup, J.R. Lindermuth stopped by Omnimystery News to chat about his new mystery novel, Shares the Darkness; Crimespree Magazine sat down to talk wth Gary Phillips, the "Hardest Working Man in Crime Fiction"; Stay Thirsty Publications grilled Edgar and Shamus nominated author Duane Swierczynski about his latest noir tale, Revolver, which follows three generations of cops and crimes in his home city of Philadelphia (officer worker cubicle warning: this piece starts off with audio of gunfire); and This is Writing interviewed prolific author O'Neil De Noux about his many books and over 350 short stories.