Mystery Melange

 

The Black Spring Crime Series announced that the inaugural judge for its new crime-mystery prize will be Lee Child, best-selling author of the Jack Reacher series. The Big Bang: Black Spring's Best Opening to a Crime/Thriller Prize is open to anyone over the age of 18 who wants to write in the English-language and has an interest in crime, thriller or mystery novels. Organizers are looking for the best 50-200 words of an opening for a crime-mystery-thriller novel/story. The work must be never-before-published (including online), original to the author, and ideally written for this prize. It need not be connected to a completed book, and it's hoped the prize encourages people to start a novel, with this first page – and maybe go on to complete it. Writers can enter as many times as they want. The contest opened on September 7th and will close on December 7th. (HT to Shots Magazine)

A group of authors including Michael Chabon (The Yiddish Policemen's Union) have filed suit in federal court against OpenAI, alleging the company unfairly used their copyrighted works to teach its chatbots how to respond to written prompts. The suit notes that responses from a model like OpenAI’s ChatGPT are “entirely and uniquely dependent on the text contained in its training dataset,” adding that the chatbot can generate summaries and in-depth analysis of themes in the authors’ copyrighted works.

The American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) has a call for papers for an interesting and unusual topic. This seminar takes the global environmental crisis as a starting point to consider the ways that global crime fiction has sought to expose, mitigate, reflect, and reconfigure impending catastrophe. Contributions are invited that consider how or how well "the (crime) genre’s central ideological concerns with culpability and criminality" align to the climate crisis. Interested authors can submit individual paper abstracts by September 30, with the conference scheduled to place at the Palais des congrès de Montréal in Montreal, March 14-17, 2024. (Hat tip to Shots Magazine)

A life-sized bronze statue of Agatha Christie was unveiled by Christie’s grandson, Mathew Prichard, in the Oxfordshire town of Wallingford, near where the iconic novelist resided for more than forty years. Sculptor Ben Twiston-Davies, who also designed the Agatha Christie memorial in London, explained that it shows her "looking out as if she’s seen a clue for one of her stories." Christie bought Winterbrook House, located on the banks of the River Thames near Wallingford, in 1934. Many of her books were written at the house, and it remained her primary residence until she died there in 1976. She is buried in the churchyard of St Mary’s Church, Cholsey, just south of Wallingford.

Gentle Readers, start your to-be-read-pile engines. The Rap Sheet posted a list of choice crime novels being released in fall and early winter 2023.

Janet Rudolph has a list of mysteries set during the days of awe: Rosh Hashanah (September 15-17) through Yom Kippur (September 24-25).

An early Van Gogh worth €3m-€6m (£2.6m-£5.2m) stolen from a Dutch museum three years ago was being passed around the criminal world like a hot potato, according to art detective Arthur Brand, who had a hand in the return of the painting Monday night. Brand, who is most famous for having recovered the "Hitler’s Horses" bronze statues, a Picasso painting and a ring that once belonged to Oscar Wilde, told The Guardian that such a famous stolen item had become "a headache" and that the man who eventually handed it over had nothing to do with the theft.

In the Q&A roundup, Indie Crime Scene interviewed Maggie Giles, whose novel Twisted has its debut on September 19; and Writers Who Kill's Grace Topping chatted with Frances Brody about her historical Kate Shackleton mysteries set in various locations in Yorkshire, England.