Mystery Melange

The Welsh crime fiction conference, Crime Cymru, announced the winners of the inaugural Crime Cymru First Novel Prize in English and in Welsh. Writers were asked to submit the first 5,000 words of a crime novel with an accompanying synopsis of the complete plot. Gwyneth Steddy won top honors for her novel, Do Sleeping Dogs Lie. The other finalists were Dyffryn ap Gwilym for A Mortal Occupation and Joanna Masters for Secrets. Steddy wins a year of mentoring from a Crime Cymru member plus a four-night stay in Nant, the writing retreat on the grounds of Ty Newydd, Wales’s national writing centre.

Bestselling writers Thomas King, Shari Lapena, and Kathy Reichs are set to headline the inaugural Motive Crime & Mystery Festival, a new Toronto-based literary event for crime and mystery writing. Run by the Toronto International Festival of Author, Motive takes place June 3 to 5, 2022 at Harbourfront Centre. Nearly 100 writers will be featured at the event, including English novelist Mark Billingham, Norwegian writer Thomas Enger, American authors Kellye Garrett and E. Lockhart, Scottish writer Val McDermid, Canada's former chief justice Beverley McLachlin, Murdoch Mysteries creator Maureen Jennings, and debut Toronto novelist Nita Prose. Some authors, including American authors Harlan Coben, Walter Mosley and others, will be joining at virtual events. (HT to the CBC)

This year, PulpFest will celebrate its 50th anniversary from August 4 - 7, 2022, in Pittsburgh, PA. Fifty years ago, there were no organized gatherings specifically geared toward pulp fiction and the magazines in which it appeared. That all changed when Ed Kessell, Earl Kussman, and Nils Hardin founded Pulpcon in 1972, now called PulpFest. This year's special guest will be Robert J. Randisi, whom Booklist call  "one of the last true pulp writers." PulpFest 50 will also honor the centennial of Fiction House, the pulp magazine and comic book publisher. Additionally, PulpFest will salute the ninetieth anniversary of Popular Publications’ "Dime" line of pulp magazines, particularly Dime Western and Dime Mystery. Both magazines debuted in 1932 and played a major role in the evolution of popular fiction.

On her Mystery Fanfare blog, Janet Rudolph compiled a list of books for Cinco de Mayo, which is traditionally celebrated on the 5th Of May, and commemorates the victory of the Mexican militia over the French army at The Battle Of Puebla in 1862. She's supplement the list with Mexican mystery writers and books set in Mexico and on the Mexican-American border. 

A previously unpublished script for Ian Fleming’s James Bond screenplay, Moonraker, reveals a very different 007, as well as no Moneypenny, and no "M." As The Guardian reported, the finished movie could not be more different from the author’s own version of the film. The undeveloped screenplay has come to light as part of a major collection of Bond material amassed by two leading antiquarian bookshops in London, Peter Harrington and Adrian Harrington Rare Books, where Jon Gilbert is the resident Fleming expert. Gilbert noted that the screenplay is "much more serious" than the 1979 film, which reflects the time when it was created with Cold War and nuclear threats.

A study from Clever Real Estate analyzed publicly available data from Libraries.org, IndieBound, the National Center for Education Statistics, Publishers Weekly, and Google Trends to rank the 50 most populous metro areas in the U.S. from the best to the worst cities for book-lovers. Did your city make the list?

This week's crime poem at the 5-2 weekly is "Duper's Delight" by Carolynn Kingyens.

In the Q&A roundup, Writers Who Kill spoke with Linda Norlander about her Cabin by the Lake Mystery series and her soon-to-be-released book, Death of a Snow Ghost; Tom Mead chatted with Publishers Weekly about his new novel, In Death and the Conjuror, in which he gives magician sleuth Joseph Spector three impossible crimes to solve; and Esquire sat down with Lauren Beukes, who novel The Shining Girls is now an Apple TV+ series, to discuss why she no longer believes in "the fairy tale of justice," and the murder that haunts her.