Mystery Melange

 

The winners of the 33rd Annual Lambda Literary Awards were announced, chosen from finalists selected by a panel of over 60 literary professionals from more than 1,000 book submissions and over 300 publishers. I Hope You’re Listening by Tom Ryan (Albert Whitman & Company) won top honors as this year's Best LGBT Mystery Novel. The other finalists in that category include: Death Before Dessert, A.E. Radley (Heartsome Publishing); Find Me When I’m Lost, Cheryl A. Head, (Bywater Books); Fortune Favors the Dead, Stephen Spotswood (Doubleday); and Vera Kelly Is Not a Mystery, Rosalie Knecht (Tin House Books).

Sisters in Crime announced the winner of its inaugural Pride Award for Emerging LGBTQIA+ Crime Writers, which includes a grant of $2,000 to a new crime fiction author who identifies as LGBTQIA+. This year’s debut prize goes to C.J. Prince of West Orange, New Jersey. Prince will receive a manuscript critique from Crooked Lane Books editor, Terri Bischoff. In addition, five runners-up will be paired with established Sisters in Crime member authors for manuscript critiques: Sandy Bailey; Alix Freeman; A.L. Major; Mary Lewis Pierce; and Jamie Valentino.

The 2021 Bony Blithe Award for Canadian light mystery was announced, and the winner is Iona Whishaw for A Match Made for Murder. The honor shines the spotlight on cozies, capers, satires, and humorous books – in short, "anything from laugh-out-loud books to gentle humor to good old-fashioned stories with minimal overt violence or gore." The Bony Blithe Award was created ten years ago as part of the Bloody Words conference in Canada and continued to be presented even after the demise of the conference in 2014. However, organizers announced that 2021 will be the last Bony Blithe as they transition to a "light mystery newsletter" going forward.

The 2021 Maine Crime Wave takes places this Saturday via Zoom, with panels, a keynote talk, virtual book room, a contest, and much more. Highlights include a Keynote Talk from inside the crime publishing world by award-winning Minotaur editorial director, Kelley Ragland, panels with award-winning and best-selling crime writers Lou Berney, Paul Doiron, Tess Gerritsen, Alexia Gordon, Chris Holm, Michael Koryta, Jess Lourey, Isabella Maldonado, Carla Neggers, and James Ziskin, as well as a Two Minutes in Quarantine reading, and Noir at the Bar event in the evening.

Harvill Secker and Bloody Scotland International Crime Writing Festival have relaunched their joint award to find the most exciting new crime fiction by writers of color. The winner of the Harvill Secker-Bloody Scotland Crime Writing Award will have their book published under the Harvill Secker imprint, in a publishing deal with an advance of £5,000. Entries opened yesterday and will run until the August 4, following a hiatus last year over lockdown. The winner will be announced in September and will feature in a panel appearance at the Bloody Scotland festival.

The Curtis Brown writing school is launching an annual novel-writing scholarship in honor of late thriller writer, John le Carré, seeking out "compelling storytelling and political engagement." Applications for the first scholarship are now open and will provide full funding for one talented writer of limited financial means to join Curtis Brown Creative’s three-month online Writing Your Novel course running from September 6 to December 13.

Anthony Horowitz will write his third official James Bond novel, to be published by Jonathan Cape in 2022 on behalf of Ian Fleming Publications. Horowitz is the fourth author in recent years to be invited by Ian Fleming Publications to write an official Bond novel, and the only one to have been invited back to write successive ones. Trigger Mortis was published in 2015, followed by Forever and a Day in 2018. Previous authors have included William Boyd, Jeffery Deaver, and Sebastian Faulks.

Elizabeth Foxwell, editor of the McFarland Companions to Mystery Fiction, made note of the next edition in that series, the eleventh, which will be Dorothy L. Sayers: A Companion to the Mystery Fiction by Eric Sandberg. As Foxwell aptly notes, previous installments in the series have garnered Edgar nominations (Ellroy companion, Rankin companion), an Agatha nomination (Paretsky companion), and a Macavity Award (Paretsky companion).

Indie bookstores in the US are “on the rise again” but face challenges as the country opens up after a roiling 15 months, according to the American Booksellers Association. While association CEO Allison K. Hill and others had feared that hundreds of stores could go out of business during the 2020-21 holiday season, the ABA has tallied only 14 closings in 2021 so far, along with more than 70 last year. “It’s fair to say that it could have been much, much worse,” Hill said, describing the independent community as “bruised” but standing.

Sixty-three percent of authors and illustrators in the UK, responding to a quick-fire survey from The Bookseller this week, said they had seen a fall in income in pandemic-hit 2020 compared with 2019, including squeezes on author advances and the loss of earnings from live events. The Society of Authors (SoA) has said 250 people have applied to its hardship fund this year, on top of nearly 1,200 applicants in 2020, indicating the “desperation” of many.

Maybe this is a trend that will help.

This is another trend I'd like to see more of: book butlers.

This week's crime poem at the 5-2 is "Hillside Stranglers" by Peter Mladinic.

In the Q&A roundup, James Patterson and Bill Clinton spoke with Time Magazine about The President’s Daughter, the follow-up thriller to their bestselling co-written debut; Terrie Farley Moran stopped by the Writers Who Kill blog to talk about picking up the mantle for the popular Murder, She Wrote continuation novel series; and Lisa Haselton chatted with international thriller author, William McGinnis, about his new suspenseful sea adventure, Cyclops Conspiracy: An Adam Weldon Thriller, and also with mystery author Susanne M. Dutton, about her latest novel, Sherlock Holmes and the Remaining Improbable.