Mystery Melange

 

The Wonderland Ballroom in Washington, D.C., will host an event as part of the "Chilled to the Marrow" Noir at the Bar series on October 27 from 5-6:30. Author Duane Swierczynski is a beloved member of the crime fiction community, and his daughter Evie is currently undergoing treatment for leukemia, which has taken a financial toll. So, Philadelphia crime writer Jon McGoran came up with an idea to have a series of Noir at the Bars as fundraisers, with all the proceeds going to the "Team Evie" GoFundMe. E.A. Aymar will host and wrangle a team of authors including Kathleen Barber, Tara Campbell, Aimee Hix, Eleanor Cawood Jones, Angie Kim, Adam Meyer, Deb Shutika, Erica Wright, and Jenny Yacovissi for readings and book signings. This event will be FREE to attend, but they are asking for donations for Team Evie throughout the night, and all of the book sales will go to that cause.

Also helping out the Swierczynski family is a charity auction thanks to the crime fiction festival Murder and Mayhem in Milwaukee. This year's charity auction will raise money for The Children’s Hospital in Milwaukee and make a donation in honor of their daughter "who has been facing her health crisis like a superhero." They're looking for signed books, character names from authors willing to put winners in their next book or anything else you think people might want to bid on. For more information, check out this info from Crimespree Magazine.

Georgia Fancett has been awarded a £20,000 publishing contract with Century for her police procedural The Fifth Girl, her prize after winning the Daily Mail and Penguin Random House's First Novel Competition, now in its third year. The Fifth Girl is described as "a hard-hitting police procedural novel in which four girls have been found murdered in similarly gruesome circumstances" by the Daily Mail, featuring a gay detective, DI Alice Warnes, who is paired with "a lazy, Trump-loving bigot" for her fellow detective partner.

The inaugural Capital Crime festival in London, scheduled to take place September 26-28 of 2019, will begin selling a limited number of specially priced early bird weekend and day passes next week, on October 15. Founded by David Headley and Adam Hamdy, Capital Crime is a new festival dedicated to all things crime and thriller, from book to screen. (HT to Ayo Ontade at Shots)

A bit of sad news this week, as reported by Mystery Fanfare: MaryAlice Gorman, founder and longtime owner of the Mystery Lovers Bookshop in Pittsburgh, PA, has passed away. She was a great supporter of the mystery community, and she and her husband Richard Goldman were honored with the Raven Award, handed out annually by The Mystery Writers of America for outstanding achievements and leadership contributions to the mystery genre.

The Five Minute Library blog posted a list of 100 reasons libraries are better than Amazon or Starbucks.

Here are some sites to put on your bucket list: ten of the oldest libraries in the world. Or, maybe you'd prefer some of the "weirdest libraries around the world."

The latest poem at the 5-2 crime poetry weekly is "Lesson Plan" by Charles Rammelkamp.

In the Q&A roundup, UK Climbing magazine chatted with 94-year-old Gwen Moffat about her climbing- and mountain-themed crime novels, which are now being released in electronic form (I featured one of Moffat's books as an FFB); Tana French spoke with Entertainment Weekly about her latest novel, The Witch Elm, and why she loves writing mysteries; Tana French was also interviewed on Crimereads, where she made the case that "we're all unreliable narrators"; and the Mystery People spoke with Reavis Wortham about the latest in his Red River mystery series, Gold Dust, which heads off in different directions with plots involving a CIA experiment, modern cattle rustles, and a fake gold rush.