Mystery Melange

You can register now for a free online MWA 2022 Symposium: Special Awards on April 26 at 8pm. Oline Cogdill will be in conversation with Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Laurie R. King, Raven Award recipient Lesa Holstine, and Ellery Queen Award recipient Juliet Grames. The MWA's Edgar Awards Banquet will take place Thursday, April 28, in person once again at the New York Marriott Marquis.

Another one-day crime event will be taking place in person at California's LitFest Pasadena on April 30. There will be panels on the Geography of Crime and True Crime, as well as a panel titled "Mysterious Dimensions" featuring crime fiction authors Wendy Heard, Joe Ide, Kwei Quartey, Pamela Samuels Young, and Gary Phillips as moderator. The evening highlight will be author, Michael Connelly (the Bosch series), in conversation with fellow author, Gregg Hurwitz (Orphan X), about adapting their books for the screen.

Knopf will be publishing three new books in its Millennium series, which launched with Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The new titles will be written by bestselling Swedish author Karin Smirnoff, who is taking over the series from David Lagercrantz, after he penned three titles following Larsson's death in 2004. Smirnoff, who grew up in a small Swedish town a short drive from where Larsson was raised, has sold over 700,000 copies of her books in her native country. Speaking to the job of continuing the series, Smirnoff said she wants to "continue to build on Stieg Larsson's core themes, such as violence, abuse of power, and contemporary political currents." Smirnoff's first installment is set to published on September 5, 2023. 

Coming in September is The Perfect Crime: Around the World in 22 Murders, ed. by Vaseem Kahn & Maxim Jakubowski. This hefty volume of crime stories (it's 448 pages) contains twenty-two gripping tales that range from cozy to thrillers and from historical to noir as it takes readers on a journey through a number of diverse cultures and murderous scenarios. As Jakubowski points out in the introduction, it gathers "for the very first time...authors from a variety of cultural and ethnic backgrounds, including African-American, Asian, First Nation, Aboriginal, Latinx, Chinese-American, Singaporean and Nigerian." Authors include Oyinkan Braithwaite, Abir Mukherjee, S.A. Cosby, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, J.P. Pomare, Sheena Kamal, Vaseem Khan, Sulari Gentill, Nelson George, Rachel Howzell Hall, John Vercher, Sanjida Kay, Amer Anwar, Henry Chang, Nadine Matheson, Mike Phillips, Ausma Zehanat Khan, Felicia Yap, Thomas King, Imran Mahmood, David Heska Wanbli Weiden, and Walter Mosley.

I wish there had been something like this while I was still in college: As Elizabeth Foxwell notes at her Bunburyist blog, the UNC Libraries' online exhibition, "Teaching with Mass-Market Paperbacks," draws on the collection of UNC Chapel Hill to assist instructors who wish to use such works in their classroom, with sample lesson plans. Mystery books include assorted works by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler; The Blue Geranium by Dolan Birkley (aka Dolores Hitchens); The Couch by Robert Bloch; Honeymoon in Hell by Frederic Brown; Cassidy's Girl by David Goodis; A Taste for Honey by H. F. Heard; I Married a Dead Man and other works by William Irish (aka Cornell Woolrich); and Sorry, Wrong Number by Allan Ullman and Lucille Fletcher.

Foxwell also brought our attention to the Bookmaven account on Tumblr, which features 1970s covers by artist Tom Adams (1926-2019) of various works by Raymond Chandler. Adams (1926–2019) was also known for his paperback covers of Agatha Christie titles. Adams won various awards for illustration, notably the American Society of Illustrators, The American Art Directors Association, and The Design and Art Directors Association, UK. His work is also in numerous private collections. (Fun bit of trivia: Adams' design for the Fontana Books edition of the Agatha Christie mystery Death in the Clouds, featuring a giant wasp, inspired the monster in the Doctor Who adventure The Unicorn and the Wasp, broadcast in 2008. A copy of the book, featuring Adams's cover, appeared in the episode.)

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. After her passing, the series was relocated to Art Taylor's website, with the latest offering being Wendy Hornsby's Depression Era tale, "Nine Sons," which won the 1992 Edgar Award for Best Short Story and was later the title story of her collection from Crippen & Landru. At the time of her Edgar win, Wendy had published two books in her Kate Teague Mystery Series, and her subsequent series featuring documentarian and amateur sleuth Maggie MacGowen now numbers 12 novels, including most recently 2019’s A Bouquet of Rue. She also taught ancient and medieval history at Long Beach City College for many years, recently bestowed with the title of professor emerita.

Tessa Wegert is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Forbes, The Huffington Post, Adweek, and The Economist. She's also the author of the Shana Merchant series, beginning with Death in the Family, and recently applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Dead Wind.

Researchers from the data and analytics group, WordsRated, looked at nearly 17,500 libraries over the last three decades and found that these institutions aren’t dying in the digital age—they may actually be thriving. Although visits to U.S. libraries have dropped by 21 percent since 2009, there are actually more people borrowing books than ever before.

Over at the Do Some Damage blog, Scott Adlerberg paid tribute to the "crime commissary," the Italian restaurant Forlini's in Manhattan's Chinatown. Adlerberg dubbed it "probably the site of more crime-related discussions than just about any restaurant in existence," due to its proximity to the Manhattan courts and Manhattan jail. Over the decades, since its opening in 1943, it became a favorite lunch spot of countless lawyers, judges, jurors, court reporters, and other law enforcement personnel. Unfortunately, the restaurant is closing, although not due to Covid; the current owners, "Big" Joe, Derek, and "Little" Joe, basically just said, "Well, it's time."

This week's crime poem at the 5-2 weekly is "Alliteration" by D.M. Testa.

In the Q&A roundup, Lisa Haselton chatted with mystery author Pat Duggan about her new cozy novel, Murder at Serengeti Plains; Indie Crime Scene spoke with Jeffrey Fleishman, author of Good Night, Forever, which debuts on April 12; and over at Do Some Damage, Jay Stringer, author of the upcoming heist novel, Roll With It, interviewed ... Jay Stringer.