Mystery Melange

 

The coronavirus pandemic continues to hit many of the crime fiction conventions, conferences, and festivals. One of the latest is St Hilda's Crime in the UK, although organizers announced that a virtual event will still go on with live broadcasts, Q&As, lectures, entertainment, and a packed Crime Fiction Festival on August 15. Participating authors already confirmed include: Val McDermid, Mick Herron, Sarah Hilary, Jill Dawson, Tom Wood, Mary Paulson Ellis, Anna Mazzola, Andrew Wilson, Sara Sheridan, Vassem Khan,
and Andrew Taylor.

Over the past few years, independent publishers have won prizes, engaged readers, and published innovative and important books. But a survey on the impact of Covid-19 on small presses, carried out by the Bookseller and writer development charity Spread the Word, reveals that 60% of the small presses polled fear they could be out of business by the autumn, 75% don’t know if they will make it beyond March next year, while 85% of the publishers have seen sales drop by more than half. A key takeaway here is: shop your local indie bookstores! Many have online ordering and home delivery or curbside pickup.

Not all bookselling news is bad during the coronavirus: Unit sales of print books continue to defy expectations that the coronavirus crisis will lead to a plunge in sales. Last week, unit sales of print books had their second consecutive week of double-digit growth over the previous week at outlets that report to NPD BookScan. For the week ended May 9, 2020, print units were up 10.5% over the prior week, and rose 9.9% over the week ended May 11, 2019. (This, despite a downturn in overall brick-and-mortar bookstore sales due to partial shutdowns.)

Even better, according to a study in the UK, reading books has surged in lockdown. The survey reported that time spent with books has almost doubled, with thrillers and crime the favorite genres. More than half (52%) of the respondents said they were reading more because they had more spare time, 51% said it was because they wanted to stay entertained, and 35% felt books were providing “an escape from the crisis."

In more UK book news, Lee Child's The Midnight Line is the UK's most often loaned library book of 2018/19. Child dominated the ten most loaned print books, with fellow Jack Reacher novels Night School – the previous year's most borrowed book – at number seven and Past Tense at number five. NYPD Red by James Patterson, Dead if You Don’t by Peter James, Wild Fire by Ann Cleeves, Two Kinds of Truth by Michael Connelly, and Dan Brown's Origin rounded out the top ten in the list.

Edinburgh-based crime writer Val McDermid is offering readers the chance to have a character named after them in her upcoming new novel. The author has teamed up with her hometown football club Raith Rovers for an auction, with the chance to appear in her upcoming Karen Pirie thriller, Still Life, up for grabs. The football club will share the proceeds from the auction evenly with the Homeless World Cup Foundation.

Did Agatha Christie "borrow" the plot for her novel, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd? Lucy Moffatt, a British translator living in Norway, has found a likely source for the famous solution to the murder in an early English magazine translation of a Stein Riverton story.

The latest crime poem at the 5-2 Weekly is "Ca" by Ron Riekki.

In the Q&A roundup, Criminal Element's Book Series Binge chats continued with Archer Mayor on the Joe Gunther Series; E. B. Davis interviewed James M. Jackson about his new Seamus McCree novella for the Writers Who Kill blog; Book Savvy Reviews spoke with Merry Jones about her latest domestic suspense novel, What You Don't Know; and Kathy Reichs sat down with the CBC to talk about how Montreal shaped her approach to writing bestselling crime fiction, including her Bones series.