Mystery Melange

 

The Deadly Ink Mystery Conference announced that the David Award Winner for the best mystery published in 2018 has been awarded to Yesterday's News by R.G. Belsky. The other finalists included Died in the Wool by Peggy Ehrhart; The Consultant by TJ O’Connor; Misty Treasure by Linda Rawlins; Second Story Man by Charles Salzberg; and Feral Attraction by Eileen Watkins. The award is named in memory of David G. Sasher, Sr., a great supporter of the mystery genre and a prime mover in the early days of Deadly Ink.

Women dominate the Goldsboro Glass Bell Award this year, making up five of the six-strong shortlist, which include three thrillers – the 2018 Man Booker longlisted Snap by Belinda Bauer; Our House by Louise Candlish, which won the British Book Award Crime & Thriller of the Year; and lone male author M W Craven’s CWA Gold Dagger-shortlisted The Puppet Show. The award celebrates the best storytelling across all genres of contemporary fiction, with the winner to be announced at the Goldboro bookshop on Monday, September 16.

Sisters in Crime (SinC) announced the 2019 winner of the annual Eleanor Taylor Bland Crime Fiction Writers of Color Award: Jessica Martinez of Orcutt, CA, for her novel-in-progress that features Teia Santiago, a police detective whose father-in-law blackmails her into kidnapping a textile manufacturing heiress—who also happens to be her sister-in-law.

The Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) Dagger Awards, which honor the very best in crime writing, has created a new Dagger category for the first time in over a decade. The new prestigious Dagger will be awarded annually to the Best Crime and Mystery Publisher of the Year, to be nominated by a representative group of leading book reviewers, booksellers, festival organizers, bloggers, literary agents and journalists.

Walter Mosley, whose new book on craft is titled Elements of Fiction, will be in conversation with fellow author Jonathan Santlofer for an event titled "Master Class — Walter Mosley on the Craft of Fiction, The event is scheduled for September 12 at The Center for Fiction in Brooklyn, NY. Walter Mosley is the author of more than fifty critically-acclaimed books, including the major bestselling mystery series featuring Easy Rawlins.

The Golden Age of Crime: A Re-Evaluation, a two-day international conference at the University of Chester April 3-4, 2020, has issued a call for papers. As well as interrogating the staples of "Golden Age" crime (the work of Agatha Christie and/or Ellery Queen, the puzzle format, comparisons to "the psychological turn"), this conference will look at under-explored elements of the publishing phenomenon. Organizers invite proposals for 20-minute papers or panel presentations of one hour, to be sent no later than December 15.  (HT to Shots Magazine)

Mystery Readers Journal: "Mystery Down Under" (Volume 35:2: Summer 2019) is available now as a PDF and hardcopy. This issue is also timely, as the Ngaio Marsh Award Nominees (New Zealand) and Ned Kelly Award Longlist have just been announced.

Mystery Readers Journal editor Janet Rudolph also shared some sad news about the passing of mystery author Orania Papzoglou aka Jane Haddam, who penned the Gregor Demarkian and Patience McKenna series.

Daily Beast editor Christopher Dickey wondered, "Did Novelist John Steinbeck Spy for the CIA in Paris?" During the same summer that he wrote The Amiable Fleas, now published in English for the first time, the American author also appears to have been gathering intel for the Agency.

An Agatha Christie-obsessed librarian helped solve a decades-old murder mystery:  four bodies of a woman and three young girls discovered in a New Hampshire park went unidentified for years, until Rebekah Heath looked into the case.

The most-borrowed book in the UK? According to figures released by UK public libraries, Night School by  Lee Child was the most borrowed library book of 2017/18, followed closely by John Grisham’s The Whistler. Michael Connelly had two books in the top five, with The Wrong Side of Goodbye at number three and The Late Show at number five, while James Patterson continued his overall domination as the most-borrowed author for the 12th year running.

Now this is what I call recycling! A retired Boeing 727 has been repurposed as a 21st-century library in Ciudad Hidalgo, Michoacán state, Mexico. Called Biblioteca en las Nubes, or Library in the Clouds, the plane's fuselage is equipped with high-speed internet, computers, and tablets so that students can conduct research. It also has a projector and screen to show educational films. The rear of the plane serves as a reading lounge, while in the cockpit students can try their hand at flying the plane using a virtual reality flight simulator.

This week's crime poem at the 5-2 is "Summer of '77" by John Kaprielian.

In the Q&A roundup, Ashley House chatted with Megan Goldin (author of The Escape Room); author Jo Nesbø discusssed what shapes Harry Hole mysteries, for the Indian Express; Rhys Bowen sat down with the E. B. Davis over at the Writers Who Kill blog to chat about Bowen's latest, Love and Death Among the Cheetahs, the thirteenth in the Royal Spyness mystery series; and S.J. Rozan spoke with The Mystery People about Paper Son, the latest outing for private eyes Lydia Chin and Bill Smith.