Mystery Melange

 

CrimeFest announced the winners for the 2020 CrimeFest Awards. The event, scheduled to take place in Bristol, UK from June 4 thru 7, was cancelled, but organizers announced award winners online at crimefest.com and via its social media pages on Tuesday July 7 (HT to Shots Magazine). Here are the winners (and you can see all the other finalists via this link):

• Debut Crime Novel Award: BLOOD & SUGAR, by Laura Shepherd-Robinson
• Sounds of Crime Award: BLUE MOON, by Lee Child, read by Jeff Harding
• eDunnit Award: TO THE LIONS, by Holly Watt
• H.R.F. Keating Award: THE HOODED GUNMAN, by John Curran
• Last Laugh Award: WORST CASE SCENARIO, by Helen FitzGerald
• Best Crime Novel for Children Award: MALAMANDER, by Thomas Taylor
• Best Crime Novel for Young Adults Award: BEAUTY SLEEP, by Kathryn Evans
   

Jiro Kimura of The Gumshoe Site also noted that Walter Mosley's Down the River Unto the Sea has won the 2020 Falcon Award from The Maltese Falcon Society Japan for the best hardboiled/private eye novel published in Japan in the previous year. Previous winners have included Don Winslow (a four-time winner), Dennis Lehane, Michael Connelly, and Robert Crais.

Killer Nashville is the latest event to announce it's cancelling for 2020 due to the pandemic due to the new travel bans and the recent upsurge of cases in Tennessee. They're going to postpone Killer Nashville 2020 and roll everyone's registrations forward to KN 2021 (August 19-22, 2021). Founder Clay Stafford added that "It was a hard choice, but the safety and well-being of our friends is our most important consideration. These are tough and uncharted times." This year's special guests were to be Lisa Black, J.T. Ellison, and Walter Mosley.

Although many mystery conferences are going online or being postponed until next year, Covid-19 has had its first permanent event casualty. Magna cum Murder announced on Facebook that because of deep budget cuts, the university has made the decision to close the E. B. & Bertha C. Ball Center where the annual festivities were held. This year's event was scheduled for October 23-25 in Indianapolis with Guest of Honor C.J. Box and International Guest of Honor Rt. Hon. David Trimble. The event has been frequently praised in the past by attendees and authors alike as more accessible and personable than many of the larger conferences.

The Guardian reported that crime fiction sales are booming during the pandemic. Readers have been "pouncing on stories of murder and revenge," with nearly 120,000 more crime and thriller books bought in the last two weeks of June compared to the same point last year. The genre became the UK’s most popular over the period, leapfrogging both general and children’s fiction, as readers snapped up titles including Lee Child’s latest Jack Reacher thriller, Blue Moon, Lisa Jewell’s dark The Family Upstairs, and Peter May’s prescient Lockdown.

Bloomberg had a breakdown analysis of "Who Did What in Every Agatha Christie Murder Mystery Novel," divided into graphs by the killer's age, gender, profession, relationship, motive, and method.

This week's crime poem at the 5-2 Weekly is "Spent Casings" by Terry Dawley.