Mystery Melange

 

Reed Farrel Coleman’s novel Where It Hurts, which introduced former Suffolk County cop Gus Murphy, was named winner of the 2017 Shamus Award for Best Private Eye Novel. This marks the fourth time Coleman has scored a Shamus; the first was in 2006, when his Moe Prager novel The James Deans received Best Private Eye Paperback Original honors. For all the category nominees and winners, head on over to the Private Eye Writers of America official home. (HT Gumshoe site)

The Bouchercon National Board of Directors has selected George Easter as the recipient of its 2017 David Thompson Special Service Award for “extraordinary efforts to develop and promote the crime fiction field.” The David Thompson Special Service Award was created by the Bouchercon Board to honor the memory and contributions to the crime fiction community of David Thompson, a much beloved Houston bookseller who passed away in 2010. Past recipients of the award include Ali Karim, Marv Lachman, Len & June Moffatt, Judy Bobalik, Otto Penzler, and Bill and Toby Gottfried. (HT to Bill Crider.)

A new literary prize named Svartfuglinn (The Auk) was launched in Iceland. The prize is for crime fiction by previously unpublished Icelandic authors, and is named after a 1929 novel by Gunnar Gunnarsson about a notorious 19th century double murder, making the novel one of the earliest examples of Icelandic crime fiction. The prize is founded and moderated by crime writers Yrsa Sigurðardóttir, author of the Thora Gudmundsdottir books, and Ragnar Jónasson, author of the Dark Iceland Series, who are both supplying the prize money. But the reward also includes a contract with Veröld, their Icelandic publisher, and with David H. Hedley, Ragnar’s UK agent, who was named as one of the 100 most influential people in British publishing in 2015 by trade magazine Bookseller.

Mystery Writers of America NorCal's Mystery Week returns October 14-20. The six days of events start off with a Noir at the Bar at the Latin American Club in San Francisco and also includes several panels, with participating authors including Laurie R. King, Catriona McPhersonm Sheldon Siegel, and Kelli Stanley. (HT to Mystery Fanfare.)

The International Crime Fiction Association in the UK has posted a call for papers dealing with "Crime Fiction: Insiders and Outsiders" and how they affect each other to change the genre. Proposals of 200 words are due by February 3, 2018, and accepted projects will take part in the Captivating Criminality 5 Crime Fiction conference June 28-30, 2018, Corsham Court, Bath Spa University, UK. You can find all the details here. (HT to Sandra Seamans)

Dr. Brian Cliff, Assistant Prof of Irish Studies in the School of English at TCD, profiled the book Unwilling Executioner: Crime Fiction and the State by Andrew Pepper, asserting that the author convincingly makes the case for seeing “new ways of understanding the crime novel’s capacities for imaginatively intervening in the world” and, crucially, “the limits of those interventions.”

Sarah Hilary took a closer look at the enduring legacy of iconic crime fiction author Patricia Highsmith.

The Los Angeles Times profiled a growing trend for a sub-genre of sci-fi, namely sci-fi with crime stories and mysteries that blur the two genres.

The Spy Museum in Washington, D.C. (in my own "back yard") is getting a trove of cool artifacts from the world’s largest private collection of spycraft - more than 5,000 of them, to be specific: everything from a portion of the spy plane flown by pilot Gary Powers that was shot down over Russia, to the axe used to hack exiled Soviet communist Leon Trotsky to death, to a 13-foot-long spy submarine from World War II.

There's a new Agatha Christie in town after the Duke Lemur Center recently welcomed the first aye-aye to be born at the center in six years. Named after the best-selling mystery writer Agatha Christie, the infant is one of only 24 aye-ayes in the United States.

Vincent Van Gogh: crime drama? Filmmakers Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman are behind the new animated film Loving Vincent, in which they've not only created thousands of new oil paintings in his style, but also made him the subject of a murder-mystery.

This week's crime poem at the 5-2 is "Boom" by Susan Montag.

In the Q&A roundup, Vicki Delaney was interviewed by the Huffington Post about her new mystery Body on Baker Street, the second in the Sherlock Holmes Bookshop series; the Mystery People welcomed Glen Erik Hamilton to chat about his latest novel to feature Afghan vet and “retired” heistman Van Shaw; Nigel Bird takes Paul D. Brazill's latest "Short Sharp Interview" challenge about his latest Southsiders novel, By The Time I Get To Phoenix; Attica Locke chatted with the Mystery People about her latest crime novel, the topical Bluebird, Bluebird that centers on white supremacy in a small town; and Harlan Coben sat down with the Huffington Post's Mark Rubenstein to talk about his latest novel, Don’t Let Go, which is told through the eyes of New Jersey Detective, Napoleon (Nap) Dumas.