Mystery Melange

The Best Private Eye Stories of the Year, a new annual anthology celebrating the best private eye short stories published each year, will be released by Level Short, an imprint of Level Best Books, beginning in 2025. The inaugural edition will honor the best PI stories published in English in 2024. Series editor Michael Bracken welcomes Matt Coyle as guest editor for the first volume and notes that Kevin Burton Smith will contribute "The Year in Review," an essay looking at the year’s significant events in private eye fiction.

The several bloggers who banded together to create a poll for readers to vote on the best reprint nominations of the year have named a winner. Kate Jackson, aka Armchair Reviewer over at Cross Examining Crime announced the results culled from a variety of writing styles from the mysteries, most of which were originally published in the 1930s and 1940s. This year's overall winner was He Who Whispers (1946) by John Dickson Carr (British Library Crime Classics), the first time that author has topped this particular list.

Elizabeth Foxwell's Bunburyist blog alerts us to a talk titled "Mutual Friends: The Adventures of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins," in association with the current exhibition at the Charles Dickens Museum that runs until Feb 25, 2024, and looks at the personal and professional relationship of these two Victorian authors. The UK's University of Buckingham will also host the conference "Collins and Dickens—Dickens and Collins" on June 20–21, 2024, to celebrate the bicentennial of Collins's birth and examine Dickens' role as mentor to Collins and Collins's influence on Dickens, including co-projects such as The Frozen Deep, and theatrical and film productions of their works.

If you are in the Northern Virginia area, join mystery writers Dana King, Rick Pullen, Austin Camacho, and Mark Bergin for an author discussion titled "Writing Cops, P.I.s and Reporters for Fun and Profit," moderated by Jeffrey James Higgins, on similarities and differences in writing police procedurals, journalistic heroes, and private eyes. The event will take place on Sunday, January 28, at 1 pm at Elaine’s in Alexandria, Virginia.
 

In all of the "best of" lists that come out around this time of year, crime fiction collections and anthologies are often overlooked. But the CrimeReads editors tried to correct that oversight and made their selections for the best crime anthologies released in 2023, featuring "dark indigenous fiction, true crime reckonings, weird westerns, and more."

Seems like we hardly got this year started before we begin looking to next year. Left Coast Crime announced the Special Guests for Left Coast Crime 2025: Guests of Honor are Manuel Ramos and Sara Paretsky, Fan Guest of Honor is Grace Koshida, and Toastmaster will be John Copenhaver. Registration is also now open for the event, which will be held in Denver, Colorado, March 13-16, 2025.

From Martin Edwards comes a bit of sad news: Geoff Bradley announced that the latest issue, #92, of his irregular magazine of comment and criticism about crime and detective fiction, will be the last. As Edwards notes, it's a shame that CADS won't reach its century, but Bradley has produced the magazine for 38 years, "an astonishing length of time, and he deserves the thanks of all mystery fans - in particular those with a taste for the Golden Age - for his hard work and the quality of the material he has consistently assembled. It's a wonderful achievement."

The "world’s largest Dickens festival" recently took place in the seemingly unlikely setting of the Netherlands, specifically, Deventer, in the eastern province of Overijssel. Despite no known historical connection with the author, 950 volunteers filled the streets of the ancient Bergkwartier, performing street theatre and selling hot punch and Victorian treats. There were strict rules for actors and traders: no trainers, modern watches or mobile phones. The estimated 125,000 visitors included Ebenezer Scrooge, Tiny Tim, Queen Victoria, Miss Havisham, beggars, thieves and, for the first time, Dickens himself.

The Australian Broadcasting Company took a stab at defining what is outback noir and why so much crime fiction set in regional Australia.

In the Q&A roundup, novelist Laury A. Egan chatted with Lisa Haselton about her new psychological suspense title, The Psychologist’s Shadow; Clea Simon, author of cozy mysteries and psychological suspense, applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, To Conjure a Killer; the Crime Time blog spoke with New Zealand author Kirsten McDougall about her new satirical dystopian cli-fi thriller, She's a Killer; and the American Booksellers Association interviewed Alex Michaelides, whose book The Fury, about a gorgeous, private island in Greece that becomes the site of a terrible murder, is the ABA top pick for the January 2024 Indie Next List.