Mystery Melange

 

Mystery Writers of America announced the 2024 Grand Masters and Ellery Queen Award recipient. The board chose Katherine Hall Page and R.L. Stine as the 2024 Grand Masters, an award that represents the pinnacle of achievement in mystery writing, and Michaela Hamilton of Kensington Publishing will receive the Ellery Queen Award, which honors "outstanding writing teams and outstanding people in the mystery-publishing industry." They will accept their awards at the 78th Annual Edgar Awards Ceremony, which will be held May 1, 2024, at the Marriott Marquis Times Square in New York City.

Alex Segura has won the Strand Magazine Critics Award for Best Novel for Secret Identity. The other finalists include Anywhere You Run by Wanda M. Morris; Back to the Garden by Laurie R. King; Desert Star by Michael Connelly; Her Last Affair by John Searles; and A World of Curiosities by Louise Penny. Stacy Willingham won the Best Debut award for A Flicker in the Dark, edging out Jackal by Erin E. Adams, Before You Knew My Name by Jacqueline Bublitz, Don’t Know Tough by Eli Cranor, and Shutter by Ramona Emerson. It was also previously announced that Lee Child and James Lee Burke would be honored with Lifetime Achievement awards.

Alexander McCall Smith has been knighted for his service to literature, academia and charity. The Scottish writer, who was once a professor of medical law at the University of Edinburgh, is best known for the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, although he's published more than 120 books, radio plays, operas, children’s books, and collections of poetry. McCall Smith noted, "There are others who deserve it more than I do, of course. Will it make any difference? I still have books to write. Perhaps it will put a spring in my step. We shall see. I’m very grateful to the powers that be." McCall Smith’s newest novel, The Perfect Passion Company, is released next month and is more in the romance vein.

And in more Scottish crime new, Noir at the Bar Edinburgh returns to The Canons Gait pub on January 25th. Although the full lineup hasn't been released just yet, Andrew James Greig will be there discussing his latest novel, The Girl in the Loch. Previous participants have included Jackie M. Baldwin, Ana Collins, Guy Hale, Mark Leggatt, Liza North, Cailean Steed, and Mary Turner Thompson.

Plus, Granite Noir, Aberdeen’s crime writing Festival, returns for its eighth year from February 20-25 with a mix of returning and new features. In addition to panels, interviews, workshops, readings, film screenings, and plays (including one titled "CSI – Crime Scene Improvisation"), David Suchet—whose iconic portrayal of Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot is a fan favorite—will make two appearances offering audiences the chance to meet the actor behind the detective. There's also an exhibit on "Gunpowder, Tattoos and Transportation: Aberdeen’s Inked Convicts," which explores how nineteenth century European criminologists tried to establish a connection between tattoos and the criminal underclass. New for 2024, Granite Noir has also teamed up with the Press and Journal and Evening Express to launch a new short story competition, with a submission deadline of January 28.

Mystery Readers Journal has a call for articles on "Mysteries set in Southern California." They're seeking articles (500-1,000 words), reviews (50-250 words), and author essays (500-1,000 words), which you should treat "as if you're chatting with friends and other writers in the bar or cafe (or on zoom) about your work and the Southern California setting in your mysteries." The deadline is January 19, 2024. Send to: Janet Rudolph, Editor.

The Popular Culture Network will host a virtual symposium exploring the criminal in popular culture on May 2-3, including celebrated detectives, true crime podcasts, police procedurals, the fashion of crime and deviancy, spy, war, political and corporate crimes in film, sport cheats, pickpockets and con artists, glamorous lawyers, innocent victims, and grumpy Judges. Organizers have put out a call for papers on related topics such as "You know my methods, Watson ­– The methodological gap between fictional and real detectives"; and "It is the brain, the little grey cells on which one must rely. One must seek the truth within - not without. Conceptualising crime fighting." The deadline for submissions is February 29, 2024. 

There's also a call for papers on FX Channel Original TV Series for an edited collection in a similar vein to The Essential HBO Reader. The scholarly edited collection will critically analyze FX’s history and its import to prime-time television and platform streaming with chapters on its most critically noteworthy series, such as crime dramas The Americans; Justified; American Crime Story; and Fargo. Abstracts of 300 -500 words identifying your chosen series accompanied by a short third person author bio (100 words max) should be sent to david.pierson@maine.edu as a Word document by March 10, 2024. Final chapters should be 6000-8000 words including references.

The Rap Sheet reported some sad news: John F. "Jack" O’Connell, who gained public attention as the author of crime novels set in the worn-out, fictional New England city of Quinsigamond, died on January 1. According to his obituary, he passed away after an undisclosed brief illness at the age of 64. He was known as a noir-suspense novelist, publishing five books, beginning with Box Nine for which Mysterious Press awarded him winner of The Mysterious Press Discovery Contest for best first novel in 1992. His later novels included Wireless, (1993) and The Skin Palace (1996). O’Connell was a finalist for a Shirley Jackson Award in 2008, for his final book, The Resurrectionist, and that same work won him France’s Prix Mystère de la critique in 2010.

This year marks the bicentennial of the birth of the Victorian writer, Wilkie Collins, best known for his mystery novels, The Woman in White and The Moonstone. If you're new to the author's work, The Guardian looked at some good places to begin. Meanwhile, The Telegraph (paywall) had their own retrospective on why every writer in the genre is indebted to Collins’s instinct for plotting and psychological complexity. And the CBC also profiled the author, whom they call "A true detective of the human mind."

Each year, new literary works previously under copyright fall under the public domain depending upon the various convoluted laws that vary from country to country and even within jurisdictions. As Elizabeth Foxwell points out, there are several mysteries that entered the public domain and are on the online Project Gutenberg including works such as As a Thief in the Night by R. Austin Freeman (a Dr. Thorndyke mystery); Behind That Curtain by Earl Derr Biggers (a Charlie Chan mystery); and The Velvet Hand: New Madame Storey Mysteries by Hulbert Footner, among others.

If you're a fan of both crime fiction and stamp collecting, Kate Jackson, aka Armchair Reviewer over at the Cross Examining Crime blog featured a look at "The World of Sherlock Holmes Stamps," although she also takes note of stamps issued to commemorate Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret, G. K. Chesterton, and even a Columbo stamp starring Peter Falk.