Mystery Melange

 

August Snow by Stephen Mack Jones is the winner of the 2018 Nero Award from the Wolfe Pack. The honor, bestowed upon the best crime novel in the style of Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe series, was handed out Saturday at the 41st Black Orchid Weekend. Past winners of the award have included Fred Harris, Martha Grimes, Dennis Lehane, and Sharyn McCrumb. (HT to Mystery Fanfare)

The winners of the Goodreads Choice Awards, voted on by readers and fans on the book recommendation website, were announced in several categories. The top nod in the mystery/thriller category goes to Stephen King's The Outsider. For all of the other nineteen finalists, click on over to this link.

The "best" lists keep coming, with NPR picking a list of 24 titles for its choices for "Best mysteries and thrillers" of 2018, and Oline Cogdill of the South Florida Times choosing her "best mystery novels of 2018," which includes her top 16 plus 8 noteworthy debuts.

Polis Books is launching Agora Books, a diversity-focused imprint devoted to crime and noir fiction. The new imprint will be headed by Chantelle Aimée Osmanand will launch with three titles in fall 2019 and eventually publish six to 10 titles a year. Those first three titles include Three-Fifths by John Vercher, the story of a biracial man who discovers a childhood friend has become a neo-nazi; Remember by Patricia Smith, about a woman forced to reconcile with a painful past; and The Ninja Daughter by Tori Eldridge, the tale of a woman who dedicates herself to becoming a modern day ninja after the murder of her sister.

The next issue of Mystery Readers Journal will focus on mysteries featuring crime fiction set in the American South. Editor Janet Rudolph is seeking reviews, articles, and Author! Author! essays, with a deadline of December 30.

Mike Ripley's latest Getting Away with Murder column for Shots Magazine has news of the new paperback crime imprint, Blackthorn; reviews of Ripley's best of the month and best of the year crime titles; a look at international crime fiction from Laplan, South Korea, and New Zealand; and much more.

Crime writer Ian Rankin, who penned the best-selling Inspector Rebus novels, is auctioning two bottles of whisky created in tribute to the detective. Rankin will sell a 20-year-old bottle and a 30-year-old bottle at auction, to raise cash for a charity which helps Edinburgh’s homeless population, Streetwork.

Has the mystery of Agatha Christie's disappearace for eleven days in 1926 finally been solved? A new theory that's part of a Channel 5 drama, Agatha And The Truth of Murder, suggests the crime writer was investigating a real-life murder in 92-year-old mystery that could have leapt from the pages of one of her novels.

I'm always in the mood for good literacy news, and this report caught my eye. According to studies by the UK's National Literacy Trust, the gender gap in the number of children who say they enjoy reading has narrowed, with boys aged 11 lagging only 9 percentage points behind girls of the same age.

It's time once again for the annual Bad Sex in Fiction awards. The list, which is compiled by the Literary Review, features an all-male roster this year, including Haruki Murakami, for passages from his latest novel Killing Commendatore, and also controversial US novelist James Frey for a scene in his novel Katerina described by judges as “almost like wish fulfilment”. But ultimately, it was Frey who prevailed as the worst of the worst.

The latest poem at the 5-2 crime poetry weekly is "Ballad of Annie Crudup" by Roger Netzer.

In the Q&A roundup, Crime Fiction Lover chatted with former journalist John Marrs, who has enjoyed an interesting journey as an author of standalone psychological thrillers, including The One, which is now being adapted for the small screen by Netflix; and Criminal Element spoke with Bryan Gruley, a journalist who shared in the Pulitzer Prize awarded to the Wall Street Journal in 2002, and is also the author of the popular Starvation Lake trilogy