Mystery Melange

 

 

The International Association of Media Tie-in Writers president Jonathan Maberry today announced the nominees for the Scribe Awards for superior works published in 2022. The IAMTW’s Scribe Awards honor licensed works that tie in with other media such as television, movies, gaming, or comic books. There are some honorees of interest to the crime fiction community, including in the General/Adapted Novel category: Murder She Wrote: Death on the Emerald Isle by Terrie Moran, and Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Firewall by James Swallow (which was also nominated in the Audiobook category). The winners will be announced at San Diego Comic-Con on July 21. 

Submissions are now open for the 30th Sisters in Crime’s Scarlet Stiletto Awards for best short crime and mystery stories, with a record $12,720 in prizes. The closing date for the awards is August 31, 2023, with an entry fee of $25 (or $20 for Sisters in Crime members), and a maximum length of 5,000 words. The competition is open to all women, whether cisgender, transgender, or intersex, who are citizens/residents of Australia. The first prize winner takes home $2,000, donated by Swinburne University of Technology, plus the coveted trophy, a scarlet stiletto shoe with a steel stiletto heel plunging into a mount. The shortlist will be announced in October, with the awards being presented at a gala ceremony in Melbourne in late November. In the lead-up to the ceremony, all of the winning stories over the past 30 years are being narrated by Susanna Lobez for Sisters in Crime’s very first podcast – Scarlet Stiletto Bites: Scintillating stories by Australian women. The podcast is free and a new episode is available weekly on Fridays on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, Google, and other services.

Volume 13 in the McFarland Companions to Mystery Fiction series, edited by Elizabeth Foxwell, will be on James Sallis (author of Drive, creator of detective Lew Griffin, biographer of Chester Himes, critic, poet, and cross-genre writer). The author of the retrospective is University of East Anglia's Nathan Ashman, who is also editing the Routledge Handbook to Crime Fiction and Ecology. The McFarland Companions book is expected to be issued in fall 2023.

The late Charlie Watts, longtime drummer for The Rolling Stones, was a passionate reader and book collector. Hundreds of his rare books will be put up for sale this autumn, representing the "best collection of modern first editions" to come to Christie's auctions in over 20 years. The offerings include a first edition of The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald, inscribed inside the front cover to "the original Gatsby," Harold Goldman, a screenwriter friend of Fitzgerald’s in the 1930s, expected to fetch between £200,000 and £300,000; and a first edition of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles with an inscription reading, "I perambulated Dartmoor before I wrote this book." Conan Doyle’s inscriptions are "often very formulaic," said Mark Wiltshire, a books and manuscripts specialist at Christie’s, making this "really quite special."

Here's something to consider for your summer travel plans, via the World of Footprints - Exploring the World of Crime Fiction: Unveiling the Best Destinations for Thriller Enthusiasts From London to Los Angeles, Stockholm to New Orleans, to Baltimore, and more.

And if you need another travel idea, there's the Sherlock Holmes Museum in Lucens, Switzerland, which the International Diplomat recently profiled.

This week's crime poem at the 5-2 Weekly is "Bar Fight" by Adam Stemple.

In the Q&A roundup, Deborah Kalb spoke with Siena Sterling about her new novel, The Game She Plays, and also with L.R. Dorn (the pseudonym of screenwriters Matt Dorff and Suzanne Dunn) about the new novel, With a Kiss We Die; S. J. Parris stopped by Crime Time to discuss her new book, Alchemy; and multi-award-winning author Reed Farrel Coleman was featured at Author Interviews, discussing his writing and new novel, Sleepless City, featuring NYC "fixer" Nick Ryan.