Mystery Melange

After receiving tens of thousands of entries to the annual writing contest, five self-published books, including two crime fiction titles, have made it onto the Kindle Storyteller Award shortlist. Entrants must be published in the Amazon UK store in both print and digital, with the ebook form exclusive to Amazon's KDP Select program. This year's finalists include the crime novels When Death Calls by J M Dalgliesh, the sixteenth novel in his Hidden Norfolk series, and The Gathering Of Clan McFee by Karen Baugh Menuhin, the fourteenth book in the Heathcliff Lennox murder mystery series. The winner of the 2025 Kindle Storyteller Award will be announced at a ceremony in London later this month and will receive £20,000.


Some more sad publishing news to report:  on the heels of Down & Out Press shutting its doors, two other publications have announced they're closing down. These primarily fall under the umbrella of speculative fiction, although many have taken hybrid stories that are also crime fiction-related, usually in a supernatural vein. The Canadian quarterly, On Spec, founded in 1989, is closing its doors as its managing editor is retiring; and Unnerving Books and Unnerving Magazine also announced their respective closures after almost ten years, with Cottage Crimes, featuring eight new mystery and crime stories, possibly their last issue.


The Black List, which was established in 2005, is a platform that allows screenwriters to upload their scripts for review by industry professionals for a fee, which has led to the production of several projects by studios, some that even went on to win Academy Awards. In 2024, the website expanded to include novels as a way to offer a unique entryway to potential industry exposure and connections with agents and publishers for fiction writers with unpublished novel-length manuscripts. The very first book snapped up for a project has been revealed as the crime thriller, Then He Was Gone, from Isabel Booth, which is set to be published in February of next year by Crooked Lane Books. The Black List for Fiction has also established the Unpublished Novel Award to celebrate excellent manuscripts in seven genres including Crime & Mystery and Thriller & Suspense, with a winner in each genre to receive a $10,000 grant to support it on the journey to publication.


There's a new crime fiction festival, Krimi Fest, to be held in Ljubljana, Slovenia, from October 29 - November 9, in partnership with the Institute of Criminology at the Faculty of Law in Ljubljana. In addition to top Slovenian crime fiction authors, there will be panels lectures from experts in the fields of criminology and forensics, as well as podcasts, film showings, and a crime mystery night of fun. The festival is also sponsoring two awards:  a short story contest, with the winner announced as Kamilo Lorenci, whose story will be published in the Saturday Supplement of the Delo newspaper on November 8, 2025; and the Pila Award, given for the best original Slovenian crime novel first published in 2023 and 2024. The winner will be announced during the conference from the finalists, August Demšar: Estonia (Pivec Publishing, 2024); Tadej Golob: Oh, Triglav, My Home (Goga Publishing, 2023); Maria Jakopin: Crystal Death (Hirondelle, 2024); Irena Svetek: The Black Prince (Fiction, 2023); and Mojca Širok: Emptiness (Mladinska knjiga, 2023).



From the life is stranger than fiction department: a "very significant" Jack Kerouac story was recently discovered in a highly unlikely place. Last year, a two-page 1957 unpublished manuscript signed by the author and linked to his classic of beat literature On the Road, was unearthed during the disposal of items owned by Paul Castellano, who ran the feared Gambino crime family in New York from 1976 until he was murdered in a hail of gunfire on December 16, 1985. The assassination was orchestrated by John Gotti, a Gambino boss who was dissatisfied with Castellano’s leadership and took over the organization after the hit. He was convicted of the murder of the 70-year-old Castellano in 1992 and died in prison 10 years later. It is not known how or when Castellano acquired the Kerouac story.


Via Mental Floss comes the story of Edgar Wallace, given the nickname "The King of Thrillers" who published over 170 novels and co-write the screenplay for 1933’s King Kong, led almost to financial ruin early in his career from a marketing scheme gone bad. For his first novel, The Four Just Men (1905), he had the victim meet his end in a locked room, a crime left unresolved, with the reader invited to write in with their own guess to the solution of the mystery. He offered, from his own pocket, £500 worth of prizes (the equivalent of £53,023.35, or more than $72,000, now). But due to a poorly worded entry form and an unexpectedly large number of entries, he ended up losing almost $300K by today's money, and had to sell the rights to future novels about the Four Just Men to pay back his debts.


It seems a mystery of the art world may have been solved. In an article with the Times of London, ahead of the release of his new book, Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found, art expert Andrew Graham-Dixon claims to know the inspiration for Vermeer's famous painting, "The Girl with the Pearl Earring." He notes that Johannes Vermeer received patronage from a Dutch husband and wife in Delft who were part of a radical Christian sect called the Remonstrants. They modeled their own lives on those of Christ’s apostles or his female followers such as Mary Magdalene, and the pensive-looking girl in the painting is most likely the patrons’ 10-year-old daughter, Magdalena, dressed as Jesus's follower.


On Art Taylor's "The First Two Pages" blog feature, Kendall Brunson discussed writing her story "Bad Eggs" included in the new anthology, On Fire and Under Water: A Climate Change Crime Fiction Anthology, edited by Curtis Ippolito.


This week's crime poem up at the 5-2 Crime Poetry Weekly is "Karma" by Jennifer Lagier.


In the Q&A roundup, Sophie Hannah spoke with CrimeReads on how she goes about writing a Hercule Poirot continuation novel; Megan Abbott also stopped by CrimeReads to chat about her fascination with the forbidden, her love of "weirdos," and how she got her start; Margaret Mizushima, who writes the award-winning Timber Creek K-9 Mysteries, applied the Page 69 Test to her new book, Dying Cry; and Irish novelist Jane Casey was interviewed by the Irish Examiner about the latest book in her Maeve Kerrigan detective series.