Mystery Melange

British crime author Ann Cleeves was one of the individuals named in the UK's official New Year Honours List. Creator of the Vera Stanhope, Jimmy Perez, and Matthew Veyn series, Cleeves has been recognized for her services to reading and libraries and joins the list "due to her extensive contribution to the crime fiction genre."

Darien Library and Barrett Bookstore will present a virtual evening with four bestselling thriller authors: Debbie Babitt (Saving Grace); Lynne Constantine (The Stranger in the Mirror); Wendy Walker (Don’t Look for Me); and Hank Phillippi Ryan (Her Perfect Life). Register for this free online event on Wednesday, January 12 at 7pm via this link.

The Baker Street Irregulars is planning to conduct its 2022 January events in person in New York City beginning January 13, 2022. Many events will be open to all Sherlockians with special tax-free group rates for hotel lodgings. Official BSI events that will be open to the public include the BSI Distinguished Speaker Lecture (Thursday), the Merchants Room (Saturday), and the BSI Luncheon Reception (Saturday).

If you happen to be Down Under on February 2, the National Trust of Australia (Victoria) is sponsoring the Summer of Mystery literary crime exhibition celebrating women crime writers and fictional crime fighters. Participants can join in an immersive recreation of mystery and mayhem in the historical setting of The Heights with a display featuring costumes and props from the world of Miss Phryne Fisher, as well as scenes recreated from well-known crime novels. There will also be a Trust Trail of Mystery to keep the kids busy.

Crime Reads welcomed Robert Miklitsch to talk about his latest book, I Died a Million Times: Gangster Noir in Midcentury America, and how the Senate Kefauver Committee investigation, which was broadcast on television, sparked an insatiable appetite for crime stories in 1950s America.

If you're looking for new crime fiction books to start off the new year, CrimeReads's Molly Odintz has ten suggestions for you. Over at the Shots Magazine blog, Ayo Onatade also has some upcoming titles to seek out, with an emphasis on British and European titles.

Dorothy L. Sayers: A Companion to Mystery Fiction by Eric Sandberg was recently released. It's the eleventh volume in the McFarland Companions to Mystery Fiction series edited by Elizabeth Foxwell and is a comprehensive guide to the mystery work of the creator of Lord Peter Wimsey, with info on some of Sayers's religious-related works.

It appears that at least part of a real-life publishing mystery has been solved. For the past few years, someone has been stealing unpublished manscripts from lesser-known authors and bestsellers like Margaret Atwood. The perpetrator would use a phishing scheme pretending to be affiliated with legitimate publishing houses in order to have authors send him their works. However, the pilfered books never appeared as pirated copies nor was there ever any ransom, making the crime even more baffling. But yesterday, the FBI arrested Filippo Bernardini, a 29-year-old publishing professional who worked as a rights coordinator for a major international publisher in London (in his Twitter bio, he added that he worked for Simon & Schuster U.K. which wasn't named officially in the arrest warrant). There's no word on a motive yet, although knowing what’s coming, who is buying what, and how much they’re paying, could give publishing companies an edge.

On Jan. 1, works that were first published in 1926 entered the public domain, which means they will become available for free at sites such as Project Gutenberg and Standard Ebooks. Among the books included this year: The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway; Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne; Soldiers’ Pay, the first novel published by William Faulkner; and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie.

In April 2015, B.K. Stevens debuted the blog series, "The First Two Pages," hosting craft essays by short story writers and novelists analyzing the openings of their own work, and after her death, the feature was relocated to Art Taylor's website. For the initial First Two Pages of 2022, Art welcomes E.A. Aymar, who is a gifted and dedicated author, a thoughtful and provocative essayist, a tirelessly generous supporter of other writers, and a friend to the entire community. Ed has also established himself as an extraordinary short fiction writer and talks about his latest story, "The Search for Eric Garcia," which is in the anthology, Midnight Hour: A Chilling Anthology of Crime Fiction from 20 Authors of Color, edited by Abby L. Vandiver.

Teresa Dovalpage, a college professor and author of three theater plays and twelve novels, including the Havana Mystery series published by Soho Crime, applied the Page 69 Test to Death under the Perseids, the most recent novel in the series.

This week's crime poem at the 5-2 weekly is "Epiphany 2021" by Tad Tuleja.

In the Q&A roundup, Robert McCaw stopped by Deborah Kalb's blog to talk about Treachery Times Two, the fourth in his Koa Kane series, set in Hawaii; E. B. Davis interviewed Jennifer J. Chow for the Writers Who Kill blog about her latest Sassy Cat cozy mystery , Mimi Lee Cracks the Code; and Author Interviews welcomed Karen Odden, whose novels A Dangerous Duet and A Trace of Deceit have won awards for historical mystery and historical fiction, about her latest work, Down a Dark River.