Mystery Melange

 

Michael Connelly has been chosen by the British Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) to receive this year’s Diamond Dagger award for sustained excellence in the crime fiction-writing field and will be presented with the award during a ceremony in London on October 25. Connelly joins a distinguished list of previous Diamond Dagger recipients that includes Dick Francis, Ruth Rendell, Reginald Hill, P.D. James, Peter Lovesey, Sara Paretsky, Andrew Taylor, Ian Rankin, and last year’s recipient, Ann Cleeves.

The finalists for the Hammett Prize were just announced and include The Marsh King's Daughter by Karen Dionne; The Tragedy of Brady Sims by Ernest J. Gaines; August Snow, by Stephen Mack Jones; and Two Days Gone by Randall Silvis. The awards are handed out annually by the North American Branch of the International Association of Crime Writers for a work of literary excellence in the field of crime writing by a US or Canadian author.

Finalists for the 30th annual Lambda Literary Awards that "identify and celebrate the best lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender books of the year and affirm that LGBTQ stories are part of the literature of the world," have been chosen in 23 categories, including

Lesbian Mystery

• A Quiet Death, Cari Hunter
• Fever in the Dark, Ellen Hart
• The Girl on the Edge of Summer, M. Redmann
• Huntress, E. Radley
• The Last First Time, Andrea Bramhall
• Murder Under the Fig Tree: A Palestine Mystery, Kate Jessica Raphael
• Odd Numbers, Anne Holt
• Repercussions, Jessica L. Webb

Gay Mystery

• Boystown 10: Gifts Given, Marshall Thornton
• Long Shadows, Kate Sherwood
• Love is Heartless, Kim Fielding
• The Mystery of the Curiosities, C. S. Poe
• Night Drop, Marshall Thornton
• Ring of Silence, Mark Zubro
• Street People, Michael Nava
• Tramps and Thieves, Rhys Ford

Winners will be announced June 4 at the Lambda Literary Awards ceremony in New York City.

This month, Literary Hub is launching CrimeReads, a new website dedicated to showcasing the best writing from the worlds of crime, mystery, and thrillers, "a literary culture that’s more robust than ever, but diffuse." The site will publish a daily slate of features, excerpts, interviews, reading lists, critical essays, and news from around the crime fiction community, including articles from authors including Laura Lippman on the transgressive legacy of James M. Cain, Val McDermid on the birth and boom of Tartan Noir, and Jason Overstreet on spy fiction and the black American experience. CrimeReads is partnering with publishers, booksellers, journals, author organizations, festivals, librarians, and critics, and is advised by a board of distinguished authors, including Megan Abbott, Lee Child, Carl Hiaasen, Walter Mosley, Attica Locke, Ruth Ware, and Daniel Woodrell. The Masthead also includes Senior Editor: Dwyer Murphy; Associate Editor: Molly Odintz; and Contributing Editors: Lisa Levy and Sarah Weinman.

The selected stories for the 2018 Bouchercon conference anthology Sunny Places, Shady People were announced this week, with many familiar names on the list in what promises to be a fantastic lineup of short crime fiction. Editor Greg Herren added that "we had a record number of submissions, and choosing from this embarrassment of riches was a monumental task."

The new Scandi noir? Korea is reinventing the thriller, emerging as a surprising literary force when a novel by the ‘Korean Henning Mankell’ bags a six-figure deal and sparks a global bidding war.

The New Zealand Herald profiled author Stella Duffy, who was commissioned by the Ngaio Marsh estate to complete Marsh's unfinished 1940s manuscript Money in the Morgue, about how she went about approaching the task of maintaining Marsh's style while incorporating modern sensibilities. Less troublesome was Marsh's signature character gentleman detective Roderick Alleyn, who Duffy describes as a "really juicy interesting character" to write.

Author Brad Meltzer discovered a surprising - and rather touching - secret tied into the 9-11 attacks while researching his latest thriller.

Nancy Drew, the teenage detective who first entered American fiction in 1930, will return to the page in comic book form. Publisher Dynamite Entertainment will be releasing the book in June, with writer Kelly Thompson and artist Jenn St-Onge attached to the creative team, and in fact, the entire project is being led by an all-female creative team (with the exception of editor Nate Crosby). In the new take on the iconic character, Nancy hasn’t aged a day over seventeen and returns to her hometown to crack a case involving people from her past — her childhood friends and enemies. In true mystery-noir fashion, the story involves someone who is trying to end Nancy’s career as an amateur sleuth … as well as her life.

From the "forensics of the (near) future" department comes this news nugget: "Crime happens, and there is a witness. Instead of a sketch artist drawing a portrait of the suspect based on verbal descriptions, the police hook the witness up to EEG equipment. The witness is asked to picture the perpetrator, and from the EEG data, a face appears." New research from the University of Toronto Scarborough has brought that scenario one step closer to reality by using EEG data ("brainwaves") to reconstruct images of faces shown to subjects. In other words, they’re using EEG to tap into what a subject is seeing.

This week's crime poem at the 5-2 is "Alexander Berkman: Deported by God" by Charles Rammelkamp, and the latest story at Beat to a Pulp is "Cold Turkey" by Keith Rawson.

In the Q&A roundup, Omnimystery News welcomed Michael Niemann, whose third novel in his series of international thrillers featuring Valentin Vermeulen, Illegal Holdings, was just released; the Weekly Standard snagged an interview with 63-year-old first-time novelist Stephen Mack Jones to discuss second careers, Detroit, and his protagonist, August Snow; and the CBC had eight authors quiz fellow scribe Nathan Ripley about his debut thriller Find You in the Dark.