Mystery Melange

The International Thriller Writers announced the 2017 Thriller Award Nominations in the categories of Best Hardcover Novel, Best First Novel, Best Paperback Novel, Best Short Story, Best Young Adult, and Best E-Book Original. For all the lists and nominees, head on over to the official Thriller Awards website - and congratulations to all.

The Gold Medal winners from the 29th Annual Independent Book Publishers Association Ben Franklin Awards were also announced, including The Devil's Flood: Emory Crawford Mysteries, Book Three, which won in the Mystery & Suspense Category. The Silver winners were James Waltzer's Of Sound Mind and Jeffrey Alan Lockwood's Poisoned Justice: A Riley the Exterminator Mystery.

The winners of this year's Minnesota Book Awards sponsored by the Friends of the St. Paul Library included Allen Eskens' detective novel The Heavens May Fall in the Genre Fiction category. For all the winners and finalists lists, click on over to the awards site.

The world’s biggest celebration of the crime genre, Harrogate, unveiled its full program, including a new exhibition celebration Agatha Christie and the connections between her writing, life, and publishing career using rare photographs and documents from both the Agatha Christie and Collins archives in a visually led outdoor display. The exhibition, part of HarperCollins’ 200th anniversary, will be displayed at the Festival venue, the Old Swan Hotel, where Christie was found after her famous disappearance in 1926. (HT to Shots Magazine). The conference also announced that the  91-year-old artist behind Agatha Christie’s iconic book jackets in the 1960s and 70s, Tom Adams, will make an appearance.

The St Hilda’s College Mystery and Crime Conference, to be held August 18-20, also announced its lineup this year, which includes Yrsa Sigurðardóttir as Conference Guest of Honour and Natasha Cooper as Conference Chair.  

Now through May 7, the Free Library in Philadelphia is presenting an immersive theater experience, in partnership with New Paradise Laboratories, titled Gumshoe. Visitors can participate in the "investigation" that blends disguise, subterfuge, infiltration, half-truths, and bald-faced lies, to get to the bottom of a crime that hasn’t yet happened. While you're at the library, you'll also want to check out  the companion exhibition, "Clever Criminals and Daring Detectives."  Meanwhile, over at the Rare Book Department at Parkway Central Library, the exhibition "Becoming the Detective: The Making of a Genre" continues through September 1.

The National Post took a look at how the infamous Black Dahlia murder sparked a pop culture fascination, including novels and films, and affected public perception.

More sad publishing news: Simon & Schuster shut down its Tyrus Books imprint last week, according to its publisher Ben LeRoy, who originally founded Tyrus Books in 2009, after selling his previous company, Bleak House, to Big Earth Publishing. At that time, Tyrus focused on hardboiled crime fiction, but when F&W acquired Tyrus in 2013 and its focus expanded, it began publishing literary fiction, including novels with ecological themes.

This week, the 5-2 continues its "30 Days of the Five-Two" poetry blog tour with "Harley Caress" by Joe Balaz, from Cindy Rosmus's quarterly fiction and poetry site Yellow Mama, named for the Alabama electric chair. As 5-2 editor Gerald So notes, "The poem's voyeuristic quality piqued my interest, as did the way it's written, in Hawaiian Islands pidgin. Usually, I don't know I've seen celebrities outside TV and movies until well after the fact."

In the Q&A roundup, Lesa's Book Critiques welcomed Rebecca Cantrell to talk about her Hannah Vogel mysteries, Joe Tesla thrillers, and more; the Mystery People spoke with Robin Yocum about his new novel, Welcome Murder; Gerald So interviewed several of the many and talented Derringer Award finalists on his website; and Karin Slaughter and Sara Paretsky shared a Q&A session ahead of Paretsky's new V.I. Warshawski novel Fallout and the mass market edition of Karin Slaughter's The Kept Woman.