Mystery Melange

 

Hunted by Abir Mukherjee was announced as the winner of the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year 2025. The award was presented at a special ceremony on the opening night of the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival this past weekend. Mukherjuee nudged out the other finalists: The Cracked Mirror by Chris Brookmyre; The Mercy Chair by M.W. Craven; The Last Word by Elly Griffiths; Deadly Animals by Marie Tierney; and All the Colours of the Dark by Chris Whitaker. It was also revealed that David Goodman won the McDermid Debut Award for A Reluctant Spy. As previously announced, Elly Griffiths received the Theakston Old Peculier Outstanding Contribution Award in recognition of her remarkable crime fiction writing career and "unwavering commitment to the genre."

Aspects of History's Spymasters podcast has established a book prize to honor the best in spy thrillers. The inaugural SpyMasters Book Prize is open to any spy novel, published in hardback or paperback, in 2024, including both historical and modern spy thrillers. The longlist of twenty titles will be whittled down to the shortlisted six titles to be announced on September 1, 2025, with the winner revealed later that month. (HT to Shots Magazine Blog)

On August 3rd, Sisters in Crime Los Angeles will present "The Ups & Downs of Publishing in Today's Marketplace," featuring Ellen Byron, Jeri Westerson, Terry Shames, and Daryl Wood Gerber at the Radford Studio in Culver City. Then, on August 13 at the Skirball Center, SinC LA will partner with Mystery Writers of America SoCal for "Inventing the Page," featuring S.J. Rozan, Charles Rice, and Robert Crais, with Gregg Hurwitz moderating.

St. Hilda's College in the UK hosts the 2025 Crime Fiction Weekend August 8 to 10 with this year's theme of "Detecting the Gothic: tales from the dark heart of crime fiction." The Guest of Honor is the Queen of Crime, Val McDermid, with other speakers to include Mick Herron, Stuart Neville, Stuart Turton, Ruth Ware, and more.

Mystery Readers Journal is seeking articles for their next issue on the topic of crime fiction set in Northern California. If you have a mystery that fits this theme, you can send along an Author! Author! essay: 500–1500 words, of a first person, up-close and personal nature about yourself, your books, and the theme connection. They're also looking for reviews and articles. The deadline is September 1, 2025.

Virtual Crime and Detection, a special issue of Crime Fiction Studies, has put out a call for papers on crime fiction and videogames. Crime and the many facts of its detection are major themes in many videogames, from cozy point-and-click games (such as the long-running Nancy Drew series) to multiple-path morality games (such as Wolf Among Us). This special issue will examine the intersections of the literary (narrative, text, dialogue, character) and the ludic (elements of play and game design), with an emphasis on reading videogames as crime fiction. Abstracts for the issue are due November 15, 2025, with full drafts (7,000–7,500 words) due February 15, 2026.

Throughout June and July, the Portsmouth Library and Archives hosted a series of four online talks related to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The Library and Archives are the home to The Conan Doyle Collection Lancelyn Green Bequest, an unrivaled collection of books, photographs, objects, documents, and memorabilia chronicling the life of Conan Doyle and beyond, coming from the estate of Richard Lancelyn Green. If you missed this year's lectures, you can now watch them online. (Ht to The Bunburyist)

This week's crime poem up at the 5-2 Crime Poetry Weekly is "Political Discourse" by Jerry House.

In the Q&A roundup, Crime Fiction Lover chatted with defense attorney David Secular about his debut crime novel, A Hate Crime in Brooklyn; and Ayo Onatade spoke with Stuart Turton, the bestselling author of The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, about gothic fiction and his most recent novel, The Last Murder at the End of the World.