Mystery Melange

 

Another batch of titles from Otto Penzler's famous private collection is going up for auction today via Phillip Weiss Gallery, featuring Ross MacDonald, Walter Brown, Gaston Leroux, and many others. Browse the collection here and be sure to bid online at 5 pm (this is an internet and absentee bid auction only). The second Heritage sale of Otto’s amazing collection, mostly British authors, will be held on Thursday, September 5th, including copies of Christie, Sayers, several Haycraft-Queen titles, and rare Queen’s Quorum titles.

William Morrow Paperbacks will release The Last Seance next month, a brand new collection of supernatural tales from Agatha Christie, the Queen of Mystery. The book collects Christie’s "spookiest and most sinister stories," including one that has never before been published in the United States. The Last Séance gathers twenty stories, some featuring Christie’s beloved detectives Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, in one haunting compendium that explores all things occult and paranormal, including one Christie story never before published in the USA, "The Wife of Kenite!"

The next Literary Salon in Berkeley, California, will feature author Hallie Ephron on August 21. Ephron is the New York Times bestselling author of eleven suspense novels that reviewers call "deliciously creepy" and "Hitchcockian," including her latest, Careful What You Wish For, about a professional organizer married to a man who can’t pass a yard sale without stopping. This is a free event but you must RSVP to attend, as space is limited.

Lee Child has received an invitation to join the judging panel for the 2020 Booker Prize. Andy Martin, who has written a book about his time with the author called With Child: Lee Child and the Readers of Jack Reacher, told the Sunday Times: "Lee received an invitation to be part of next year’s judging panel and he has said he would like to, as long as he could do most of it from his homes in New York and Wyoming." The Booker Prize for Fiction is awarded each year for the best original novel written in the English language and published in the United Kingdom.

Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon will take to the stage with Ian Rankin to interview the author at Bloody Scotland next month. A self-confessed crime fiction fan, the First Minister was last seen at the Harrogate Crime Festival singing backing vocals with the Fun Lovin’ Crime Writers following their appearance at Glastonbury. Other author special guests scheduled to appear at Bloody Scotland include Lin Anderson, Chris Brookmyre, Michael Robotham, Alexander McCall Smith, Denise Mina, Mark Billingham, and more.

Kary Antholis, who stepped down as President of HBO Miniseries and Cinemax Programming in June after more than 25 years, has launched his new venture, Crime Story, a news and storytelling website dedicated to crime and justice stories. The website will feature original reporting on headline-making and lesser known court cases, with a special section about Los Angeles crime stories; columns by contributors, starting with exoneree Amanda Knox with her co-writer Christopher Robinson; crime news aggregation; as well as an interview podcast by Antholis. 

Janet Rudolph posted a sad bit of news over at Mystery Fanfare:  Lea Wait, best-selling author of the Mainely Needlepoint Mysteries series, the Shadows Antique Print mysteries, and the Maine Murder Mystery series, has passed away after a bout with pancreatic cancer.

Jessamyn West, a librarian who lives in central Vermont and serves on the board of the Vermont Humanities Council, reported for CNN Online about the fight surrounding e-book lending rights for libraries - and how readers will be the ultimate losers.

Author and mystery correspondent for Kirkus, Radha Vatsa, penned an essay titled, "Yes, Crime Fiction is Literature (and Other Observations on the Genre)," using Argentinian writer Jorge Louis Borges's essays on detective fiction as a launching point. He concludes that "when crime fiction is at its best, the distinction between it and literature vanishes."

Dwyer Murphy shared his appreciation for the work of Dorothy B. Hughes, the "queen of noir," and how she conjured up a "terrible, ineffable sense of dread."

Crime Reads offered up a list of the best books, essays, and films about the Charles Manson murders on the fiftieth anniversary of the infamous killings.

This week's crime poem at the 5-2 is "Whitey on the Lam" by Etta Abrahams.

In the Q&A roundup, Tana French spoke with The New Yorker about unreliable narrators, real-world sources, and the breakdown of genre boundaries in her work; John Parker interviewed John Connolly, who's promoting the Spanish version of his novel, A Game of Ghosts (El Frio de la Muerte) at the Celsius 232 festival; Jason Beech over at Out of the Gutter Magazine chatted with Paul D. Brazill about launching Punk Noir Magazine, as well as some of his own stories including one featuring aging long-time violent hitman, Tommy Bennett, in the new anthology, A Time for Violence; Alex Segura talked up "Miami, Music, and Celebrating Contemporary Crime Fiction" for Crimereads; and authors Steve Cavanagh and Adrian McKinty told Salon how growing up during "the troubles" in Northern Ireland shaped them and their writing.