Mystery Melange

 

The winners of the 2019 Lambda Literary Awards for LGBT fiction were announced, including Best Lesbian Mystery, which went to A Study in Honor: A Novel, by Claire O’Dell, and Best Gay Mystery, won by Marshall Thornton for Late Fees: A Pinx Video Mystery. For all the winner and finalists, check out the official Lambda website.

The Private Eye Writers of America announced the finalists for this year's Shamus Awards, with winners to be announced at the PWA Banquet at Bouchercon in October:

Best Original Private Eye Paperback

She Talks to Angels by James D. F. Hannah 
No Quarter by John Jantunen
Shark Bait by Paul Kemprecos 
Second Story Man by Charles Salzberg
The Questionable Behavior of Dahlia Moss by Max Wirestone 

Best First Private Eye Novel

The Best Bad Things by Katrina Carrasco 
Broken Places by Tracy Clark
Last Looks by Howard Michael Gould
What Doesn't Kill You by Aimee Hix 
Only to Sleep by Lawrence Osborne 

Best Private Eye Short Story

"Fear of the Secular," by Mitch Alderman, AHMM
"Three-Star Sushi," by Barry Lancet, Down & Out
“The Big Creep,” by Elizabeth McKenzie, Santa Cruz Noir
"Game," by Twist Phelan, EQMM
"Chin Yong-Yun Helps a Fool," by S.J. Rozan, EQMM

Best Private Eye Novel

Wrong Light by Matt Coyle 
What You Want to See by Kristen Lepionka
The Widows of Malabar Hill by Sujata Massey 
Baby’s First Felony by John Straley
Cut You Down by Sam Wiebe 

J.E. Irvin has been named First Place winner for "The Strange Disappearance of Rose Stone" in an international competition to claim the 2019 Mystery Writers Whodunit Award, to be presented at the 6th annual Mystery Fest Key West, set for June 28-30 in Florida. This is the second time in five years that Irvin has taken top honors in the blind-judged competition.

We lost four figures in the crime fiction community in the last few weeks:

Anthony Price, 91, author of the Dr. David Audley spy novels, including Labyrinth Makers (1970), which won the CWA Silver Dagger, and Other Paths to Glory (1974), which won a CWA Gold Dagger (HT to Martin Edwards);

Also, we mourn the passing of Sandra Seamans, the force behind the My Little Corner blog, which has been indispensible to writers of short crime fiction. Albert Tucher has a remembrance on Do Some Damage;

Paul Bishop reported that W. Glenn Duncan died in Australia after a long struggle with health issues. The former journalilst and pilot wrote six books featuring Rafferty, a tough ex-cop private eye in Dallas, Texas, and won the 1991 Shamus Award for best paperback. Duncan was 78;

And Jutta Motz, Swiss crime fiction author and former president of the International Association of Crime Writers, passed away after a brief bout with cancer. 

Amazon Publishing has joined forces with Capital Crime to sponsor the festival's inaugural awards. The London-based crime and thriller festival, which will take place for the first time later this year, will acknowledge achievements of authors, TV and filmmakers within the crime and thriller community. The shortlists will be announced and voting will open on 1st July, and the winners will be presented at a drinks party on Saturday 28th at the festival.

Debut author Richard Osman will join Ian Rankin, David Baldacci, Denise Mina, and Shari Lapena for this year's Bloody Scotland International Crime Writing Festival, as organizers announced the full event schedule. Bloody Scotland "remains an open and welcoming international festival despite all the chaos at Westminster," this year welcoming authors from Spain, France, Iceland, Norway and Ireland as well as the US, Canada, Australia, India, and Mexico.

Ian Rankin is also in the news for an annual visit to Fife College last Friday to award scholarships to creative students. This year’s scholarship was open to students studying a wide range of courses that include elements of creative writing such as Journalism, TV, Radio, Acting and Performance and Higher English. To take part, students had to submit a piece of creative writing and their work was read and judged by Rebus author Rankin, himself.

Simon & Schuster fiction publishing director Jo Dickinson is leaving the firm to become Hodder’s crime and thriller publisher. During her six years in the S&S role, Dickinson has had a string of successes including Anatomy of a Scandal by Sarah Vaughan, Caroline Kepnes’s You, which has become a Netflix hit, number one bestseller Chris Carter, and the award-winning Louise Candlish.

Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine's blog featured a post by award-nominated fiction writer and short-story contributor to EQMM, Kevin Mims, who offered some reflections in homage to Herman Wouk and the decade he helped to define.

Fans of the beloved Golden Age author and creator of the Inspector Roderick Alleyn novels, Ngaio Marsh, should take note of a new companion volume by Bruce Harding in the McFarland Companions to Mystery Fiction series (edited by Elizabeth Foxwell). The volume joins other subjects in the series including John Buchan, E. X. Ferrars, Ed McBain/Evan Hunter, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Andrea Camilleri, James Ellroy, Sara Paretsky, and P. D. James.

Apparently, James Bond is still a remarkably good recruiter for the British secret intelligene agency, MI6. 

Edinburgh brewers Innis & Gunn have a limited edition beer bottle for fans of Ian Rankin's Rebus detective series, one that's based on his latest novel, In a House of Lies.

This week's crime poem at the 5-2 is "MXYZPTLK."

In the Q&A roundup, Lesa Holstine chatted with J.A. Kazimer about her upcoming mystery, A Shot of Murder; Criminal Element chatted with Sara Paretsky, who is celebrating the launch of Shell Game, the 19th V.I. Warshawski book, and also John Douglas, a groundbreaking FBI profiler who looks back at the darkest cases in his new book, The Killer Across the Table; author and veteran journalist  R.G. Belsky stopped by Criminal Element to discuss his latest work, Below the Fold, continuing the adventures of news reporter Clare Carlson; and Shots Magazine's Ayo Onatade interviewed Scottish author Mary Paulson-Ellis, whose debut novel The Other Mrs Walker was Waterstones Scottish Book of the Year in 2017.