Mystery Melange

 

The Australian Crime Writers Association announced the shortlist for the 2017 Ned Kelly Awards in three categories, Best Fiction, Best First Fiction, and True Crime. Winners will be announced on September 1 during the annual Ned Kelly Awards presentation in Melbourne. For all the shortlisted finalists, head on over to the Australia CWA website. (HT to Mystery Fanfare.)

Kill Your Darlings and the Australian Crime Writers Association also announced the shortlist for this year’s S D Harvey Short Story Competition. The $1000 award, which honors the late true-crime writer and television producer Sandra Harvey, is presented annually for a work of short crime fiction as part of the Ned Kelly Awards for Australian crime writing. The winner and runner-up of the competition will be announced at the Ned Kelly Awards on 1 September at the Melbourne Writers Festival.

The 2017 Ngaio Marsh Awards finalists were likewise announced this week after the initial longlists were whittled down for the annual contest that celebrates the best New Zealand crime, mystery, and thriller writing (fiction and non-fiction). The winners will be announced at a special WORD Christchurch event to be held on October 28. Check out all the honorees via organizer/blogger Craig Sisterson's Crime Watch.

Lizzy Barber from north London has won the Daily Mail and Penguin Random House's First Novel Competition with My Name is Alice, a book Century will publish in 2018. The crime writing competition, now in its second year, invited first-time novelists to submit 5,000 words of their book alongside a 600-word synopsis, with the winning novel chosen from over 700 crime and thriller entries.

Women’s crime writing organization Sisters in Crime announced that Latina author Jessica Ellis Laine is the winner of the Eleanor Taylor Bland Crime Fiction Writers of Color Award. This annual prize honors a "writer of color, male or female, who has not yet published a full-length work."

Diversity in fiction is a hot topic these days, and Kellye Garrett, writing for Criminal Element, profiled the relatively unknown subgenre of the black woman amateur detective.

The Malice Domestic conference announced that Brenda Blethyn will be the Poirot Award Honoree for the 2017 conference. Ms. Blethyn is an Academy Award and Emmy nominated, Golden Globe winning actress who stars as DCI Vera Stanhope in the series Vera, based on the books by Ann Cleeves. She joins the already-announced lineup that includes Guest of Honor, Louise Penny; Toastmaster Catriona McPherson; LIfetime Achievement Award winner, Nancy Pickard; Amelia Award winner, David Suchet; and Fan Guest of Honor, Janet Blizard.

Unfortunately, I have bit of sad news to report this week: retired professor and mystery author B.K. (Bonnie) Stevens passed away suddenly in the midst of preparations for a presentation at the Suffolk Mystery Authors Festival. Known for her support and activism in the crime fiction community, she was also a superb short story craftsman, and was a finalist for the Derringer, the Agatha, and the Anthony Awards this year for her Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine short story "The Last Blue Glass."

The Strand Magazine's latest issue includes the publication of a long-lost play by J.M. Barrie that spoofs Sherlock Holmes and the mystery genre. Barrie is believed to have co-written the play with humorist E.V. Lucas around 1912, the year after Barrie wrote his iconic novel, Peter Pan, but the play was never published or performed. Strand managing editor Andrew Gulli said one of his researchers discovered the play at the University of Texas where some of Barrie’s papers are held. Conan Doyle and Barrie were close friends and members of a cricket team that also included contemporary writers Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells, P. G. Wodehouse and A. A. Milne.

Anders Roslund is an award-winning investigative journalist and internationally bestselling author, as part of the crime writing duo Roslund & Hellström, looks at the "Growth of the Global Super-Genre of Scandinavian Crime Fiction," which is particularly poignant follow the death this year of his writing colleague, Börge Hellström, to cancer.

Scientific American took a look from the forensics angle at Agatha Christie’s mysterious amnesia when she stayed in a hotel for eleven days under an assumed name, supposedly because she had suffered from a loss of memory. How plausible is her story? Was it real or revenge on her cheating spouse?

Worried about getting a fair trial should you find yourself in court? A computer might be able to help.

Unfortunately, I saw this listing too late for you to have a chance to buy (for almost 3 million) the Spanish-style house that was briefly home to crime novelist-screenwriter Raymond Chandler in the early 1940s. The house was recently listed by its current owner, bassist John McVie of Fleetwood Mac fame, and although it sold pretty quickly, you can still see the photos of the place via the realtor's website.

This week, the featured crime poem at the 5-2 is "The Wolf of Moscow" by Sara Tantlinger.

In the Q&A roundup, the Mystery People's Scott Montgomery chatted with the mother-daughter writing duo P.J. Tracy about their new novel, Nothing Stays Buried, featuring a gang of crime-solving programmers in rural Minnesota; the Digital Media Ghost welcomed Anthony Award-nominated author Eric Beetner to discuss his varied career as a as a TV editor and producer and writer of hardboiled crime; in The Interrogation Room, Tom Leins caught up with Canadian crime writer Beau Johnson to discuss his brand new short story collection, A Better Kind of Hate from Down & Out Books (Johnson was also the subject of Paul D. Brazill's latest Short, Sharp Interview).