Mystery Melange

 

The shortlist for the 2021 Petrona Award for Best Translated Scandinavian Crime Novel was announced today (with the winner to be presented on November 4). The six titles from Iceland, Norway, and Sweden include:

• A Necessary Death by Anne Holt, tr. Anne Bruce (Corvus; Norway)
• Death Deserved by Jørn Lier Horst and Thomas Enger, tr. Anne Bruce (Orenda Books; Norway)
• The Secret Life Of Mr. Roos by Håkan Nesser, tr. Sarah Death (Mantle; Sweden)
• To Cook A Bear by Mikael Niemi, tr. Deborah Bragan-Turner (MacLehose Press; Sweden)
• The Seven Doors by Agnes Ravatn, tr. Rosie Hedger (Orenda Books; Norway)
• Gallows Rock by Yrsa Sigurðardóttir, tr. Victoria Cribb (Hodder & Stoughton; Iceland)

Romance, crime, and science fiction novels are among the five shortlisted books for the £20,000 Kindle Storyteller Award, which this year received a record number of submissions. The two crime fiction titles include JD Kirk's An Isolated Incident, the 11th installment in his DCI Jack Logan series, and Rachel McLean's The Corfe Castle Murders. You can see the full list of finalists here. The winner will be announced in October.

Tomorrow is the last day to bid on items in the Authors for Voices of Color auction, which is raising money for racial-justice non-profits in the publishing, education, and literacy arenas. Authors, editors, and other publishing professionals are donating items and services to raise funds for organizations that amplify voices of color. The inaugural auction, which ended in August 2020, raised more than $14,000. There are several genres included, and you can check out the thriller offerings via this link.

Join award-winning mystery authors Naomi Hirahara and Walter Mosley for an online discussion October 3 about their critically acclaimed novels. Hirahara’s latest mystery, Clark and Division, revolves around a Japanese American family building a new life in 1940s Chicago after their release from mass incarceration during World War II. Mosley’s indefatigable detective, Easy Rawlins, returns in Blood Grove, solving a new mystery on the streets of Southern California in 1969. The talk is sponsored by the Brooklyn Book Festival and will be moderated by Dwyer Murphy, editor in chief of CrimeReads.

There are a few more Noir at the Bar events coming up soon, starting off with Noir at the Bar Edinburgh at the Rose St Theatre Café with authors Alison Belsham (Her Last Breath), Sharon Bairden (Sins of the Father), Alex Nye (Arguing with the Dead), Sandra Ireland (Bone Deep), and Jackie MacLean (DI Donna Davenport series). Columbia, South Carolina, will be holding its first Noir at the Bar event on October 27 (lineup here); and the next Noir at the Bar Dallas is set for November 7 (lineup here) at the Wild Detectives bookstore.

Titan Books is releasing a new collaboration with editor Maxim Jakubowski for the first retrospective of the Crime Writer Association's Dagger Award-winning short stories. The 19 tales in Daggers Drawn bring together some of the greatest names in crime fiction to deliver a cutthroat collection of serial killers, grizzled detectives, drug dealers and master forgers. To coincide with the release, contributors Larry Beinhart, Danuta Kot, Lauren Henderson, and Martin Edwards will join Jakubowski for a live panel on Saturday, October 2, 2021, which will be streamed via Facebook Live.

To celebrate the launch of David Marcum's Sherlock Holmes and The Eye of Heka, Mystery Scene magazine readers are being invited to a chance to win $100 worth of Sherlockian tales from MX Publishing, the home of the largest Sherlock Holmes catalog in the world, with more than 400 Sherlock Holmes novels, biographies, graphic novels and short story collections. To enter, simply sign up for the magazine's free newsletter on the bottom of their home page.

There is some sad news to report following the loss of another mystery author: Frank Wheeler Jr. has passed away only a few months following a surprise cancer diagnosis at the age of 43. Jed Ayres has a personal tribute up at Hardboiled Wonderland.

The Black Cat web site has been around for almost four years now, serving up a weekly buffet of new and classic mysteries—and more recently science fiction—to thousands of readers each week. Rather than continue to release all these novels and stories as individual ebooks, they have decided to bundle them up into a convenient weekly e-magazine beginning with Black Cat Weekly #1, the September 5, 2021 issue. To celebrate, they're including double the usual word count, with three complete novels, seven short stories, and even a "true crime" feature by Erle Stanley Gardner, creator of Perry Mason. The subgenres cover the gamut, from traditional mysteries to contemporary detectives, to psychic detectives (in the case of Frank Lovell Nelson’s story, a telepathic detective, the first of 12 stories featuring Carlton Clarke from 1908, all of which will run in the Black Cat’s pages).

Cross-Examining Crime published the transcription of a talk recently given at the Paignton Zoo as part of the International Agatha Christie Festival, featuring some of the ways in which animals have made themselves at home with classic crime writers and in the mysteries their owners created. The roster has several books from the Golden Age, including the Queen of Crime herself, Agatha Christie, with a few more contemporary takes. The stories include a variety of titles, all of which included animals used as pets, muses, plot devices, or even murder weapons.

This week's crime poem at the 5-2 is "Would You Like Fries With That" by Charles Rammelkamp.

In the Q&A roundup, Criminal Element's J.B. Stevens interviewed Mark Westmoreland, author of the debut book, A Violent Gospel; the Stiletto Gang's Lynn McPherson interviewed fellow "Gangster," Cathy Perkins about her books, being a contributing editor for The Big Thrill, and writing through chemotherapy; and Writers Who Kill's E. B. Davis chatted with Rhys Bowen about God Rest Ye, Royal Gentlemen, which is Bowen’s fifteenth Royal Spyness mystery.