Mystery Melange

The Audio Publishers Association (APA) has announced the winners of the 2018 Audie Awards. The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye by David Lagercrantz (read by Simon Vance) has won top honors in the Mystery category, and The Fourth Monkey by J.D. Barker (read by Edoardo Ballerini and Graham Wintonhas) won for the best Thriller/Suspense audiobook. Also, the AudioFile Earphones Award winner was the complete Sherlock Holmes works narrated by Stephen Fry.

Lambda Literary, the nation’s oldest and largest literary arts organization advancing LGBTQ literature, announced the winners of the 30th Annual Lambda Literary Awards – or the "Lammys." The honors were handed out at a gala ceremony in New York City and included Best Lesbian Mystery: Huntress by A, E. Radley; and Best Gay Mystery: Night Drop, Marshall Thornton.

Mystery Fest Key West organizers announced that E. E. King, of Salt Lake City, Utah, has been named First Place winner in an international competition to claim the 2018 Mystery Writers Whodunit Award. Sponsored by Absolutely Amazing eBooks, King’s winning entry The Hollywood Portal wins her a Whodunit Award trophy, book-publishing contract with Absolutely Amazing eBooks, complimentary Mystery Fest Key West 2018 registration to the annual conference June 22-24, airfare, and hotel accommodations.

Sisters in Crime Australia has announced the longlists for the 2018 Davitt Awards for the best crime books by Australian women. The list includes a total of 101 titles that include 71 adult novels, eight YA novels, 14 children’s novels and eight nonfiction titles. To see the longlists in each category, click here.

June 16-17, Suffolk in the UK will host the "Slaughter in Southwold" crime festival with a line-up of authors including Mark Billingham, Sophie Hannah, Stella Rimington, Robert Goddard and Peter Guttridge. Activities included a murder mystery evening with Elly Griffiths and a crime writing quiz plus crime film double bills.

Pickford's House in Derby, United Kingdom, is hosting the exhibition "Agatha Christie: Mysteries, Murder, and More" from June 2 to November 3, 2018. The exhibition will feature various books and objects related to Christie's life and work.

Meanwhile, Samuel French, the world's premier theatrical publishing and licensing company, announced the addition of thirteen new plays to the Agatha Christie Collection. Now including 25 titles, the Collection is a unique set of plays all written by or with the direct involvement of the Dame Agatha and were chosen after a two-year research project involving a review of all Christie plays in circulation, revisiting original manuscripts, and remastering existing plays "to make them performance ready for the 21st century whilst ensuring they stay as close as possible to Agatha Christie's original vision." 

A new UK company has launched a program offering aspiring novelists an alternative to the "traditional" routes to publication: a salary from £2,000 per month to write their novels. De Montfort Literature (DML), says it will pay writers a salary to write their novels, which DML will then design, print, publish and promote.

Looking for great summer reads? CBC Radio had some suggestions for "12 must-read Canadian mysteries, thrillers and books about crime."

If you're looking for a great bookstore and happen to be in New York City this summer, check out some of these indie booksellers who are managing to stay afloat in a changing publishing world.

Writing for LitReactor, Gabino Iglesias makes the case for why "crime authors need to stop pretending they're badasses."

Writing for The Guardian, James O'Sullivan analyzed the latest James Patterson collaboration, this time with President Bill Clinton. Sullivan had previously written a paper for Digital Humanities Quarterly in which he applied an analytical study to the James Patterson "collaborative" process to determine the amount of content generated by Patterson versus his collaborating authors and how it relates to stylistic patterns.

The latest poem at the 5-2 crime poetry weekly is "Civics" by Sanjeev Sethi.

In the Q&A roundup, the Daily Mail spoke with author Mark Billingham, who has work as an actor, stand-up comic and screenwriter and recently added "rock star" to his CV; NPR's Scott Simon spoke with Anthony Horowitz about his new meta-mystery novel The Word Is Murder which sees the author jumping into the book to assist his protagonist in solving the crime; and the Mystery People's Scott Butki interviewed Ruth Ware (The Woman in Cabin 10) about her latest psychological thriller, The Death of Mrs. Westaway.