Mystery Melange

Bestselling novelist Elly Griffiths will be honored with the Theakston Old Peculier Outstanding Contribution Award, in recognition of her remarkable crime fiction writing career and "unwavering commitment to the genre." Griffiths is the author of the Dr Ruth Galloway Mysteries; the Brighton Mysteries, the Detective Harbinder Kaur series, and a new series featuring time-travelling detective Ali Dawson. Previous winners of the prestigious award include Sir Ian Rankin, Lynda La Plante, James Patterson, John Grisham, Lee Child, Val McDermid, P.D. James, Michael Connelly, Ann Cleeves, and last year’s recipient, Martina Cole. The award will be presented at the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival on Thursday, July 17th.

The Bouchercon World Mystery convention announced that the 2025 winners of the David Thompson Special Service Award are Lucinda Surber and Stan Ulrich. Lucinda and Stan have worked tirelessly with Bouchercon conventions since 2007 and are also the driving force behind the mystery conference, Left Coast Crime, which sponsors the Lefty Awards. The David Thompson Memorial Special Service Award is given by the Bouchercon Board to honor the memory and contributions to the crime fiction community of David Thompson, a much beloved Houston bookseller who passed away in 2010. Stan and Lucinda will be presented with their award at the Opening Ceremonies of Blood on the Bayou: Case Closed in New Orleans, September 3-7, 2025. (HT to Shots Magazine blog)

The CWA and the Margery Allingham Society have jointly held an annual international competition since 2014 for a short story of up to 3,500 words. The goal is to find the best unpublished short mystery that fits into Golden Age crime writer Margery Allingham’s definition of what makes a great mystery story: "The Mystery remains box-shaped, at once a prison and a refuge. Its four walls are, roughly, a Crime, a Mystery, an Enquiry and a Conclusion with an Element of Satisfaction in it." The 2025 winner is Helen Gray for "Unsupervised Dead Women." The other finalists include: "The Human Imperative" by Michael Bird; "Best Served Cold" by Ajay Chowdhury; "The Treasure Hunter" by Jane Corry; "Only Forward" by Hayley Dunning; and "A Woman of No Consequence" by Laure Van Rensberg.

Registration is now open for NoirCon 2025: Novel Journeys, with four days celebrating film noir, neo-noir, and hardboiled writing at the Palm Springs Cultural Center, from October 23-26. All-Access Passes are available at a 25% discount with early bird pricing, which ends on September 2. This year's highlights include Keynote speaker Kristen Lopez, author of But Have You Read the Book: 52 Literary Gems That Inspired Our Favorite Films; panels such as "A Lively Discussion of Colorful Characters in Current Crime Fiction" and "A Hardboiled Brunch of Writers"; a tribute to the late David Lynch; and a Noir at the Bar. Special guests include Megan Abbott, Duane Swierczynski, Marco Carocari, Barbara DeMarco-Barrett, and Gary Phillips. William Horberg will also be honored with the David L. Goodis Award in recognition for contributions to Noir Literature in the spirit and tradition of Philadelphia’s native son, David Loeb Goodis, and Adrian Wootton will receive The Jay and Deen Kogan Award for work reflecting the preservation of literary excellence and achievement.

The new exhibit "John le Carré: Tradecraft" will open at the Weston library, Bodleian libraries, on October 1, running until April 6, 2026, with artifacts that showcase the extent of John le Carré’s meticulous research and attention to detail. Exhibits seen for the first time will include his copious notes on his characters, as well as sketches in which, like a film director, he visualized those individuals in the margins of his manuscripts. The author's classic cold war-era espionage novels, including Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, have sold tens of millions of copies worldwide and inspired acclaimed films and television adaptations.

This week's crime poem up at the 5-2 Crime Poetry Weekly is "Freddie's Dead" by Pamela Ebel.

In the Q&A roundup, Writers Who Kill interviewed Barb Goffman about the new short story anthology she edited, Crime Travel, as well as her own short crime fiction; and Suspense Magazine chatted with debut author Travis Kennedy about The Whyte Python World Tour, a "hilarious, high-stakes ride through ’80s glam metal and Cold War chaos."