Australian author Kerry Greenwood, who wrote the Phryne Fisher historical detective series, has died following an illness at age 70. Greenwood published the first Phryne Fisher novel, Cocaine Blues, in 1989 and went on to write 22 novels featuring the glamorous 1920s detective. An ABC TV adaptation of the series, Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries (2012), starred Essie Davis in the lead role and ran for three seasons. A spin-off set in the 1960s, Ms Fisher's Modern Murder Mysteries, and a 2020 feature film, Miss Fisher and the Crypt of Tears, followed. Greenwood, who was also known for the Corinna Chapman mysteries, was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) in 2020. Greenwood's latest novel, Murder in the Cathedral — number 23 in the Phryne Fisher series — is due out late in 2025.
On Thursday, April 24, a "Not-Just-Noir at the Bar" hits Elaine's, at 208 Queen Street in Alexandria, Virginia. Get ready for a night of dark, mysterious and sometimes funny live storytelling from a group of talented crime fiction writers: E.A. Aymar, Chris Chambers, Tara Laskowski, Adam Meyer, Tom Milani, K.T. Nguyen, Art Taylor, and Stacy Woodson, hosted by Alan Orloff. This event is free and open to the public.
Between 2013 and 2020 Penguin (UK) published new translations of the 75 Maigret-novels by Georges Simenon, as well as some of the romans durs, with many also made available in the US market. Now Picador is bringing out the whole Maigret set in US editions. As Publishers Weekly noted, Picador (the paperback imprint of Farrar, Straus and Giroux) will largely use the translations published by Penguin, though some titles will receive new translations. Reissues of thirty of his standalone psychological noirs — which Simenon himself called romans durs, or "hard novels" — will follow beginning in winter 2026. Picador is working closely with John Simenon, the late author’s son, whom FSG president and publisher Mitzi Angel called "a wonderful partner with us in thinking about how we might present the work, who we might involve, how to describe the work." Simenon, who died in 1989 at the age of 86, is one of the bestselling authors of the 20th century, and was extraordinarily prolific in his lifetime. His oeuvre, consisting of more than 200 novels, has been translated into dozens of languages, with some estimates placing worldwide sales of his books at around 600 million print copies. (HT to M.A.Orthofer at the Literary Saloon)
In honor of National Library Week in the U.S., Janet Rudolph compiled a listing of library-themed mysteries for her Mystery Fanfare blog. (Since my mother was a librarian, this is a topic near and dear to my heart.)
Although I'm always a bit skeptical of such studies, researchers at Cloudwards scoured Google Trends data to determine which genres captivate readers most across different states, showing a geographical breakdown for each state's #1 most popular genre. According to their tally, romance tops the list in 22 states, while mystery fiction is only king in one single state—California.
In the Q&A roundup, Leslie Karst applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Waters of Destruction, the second in the Orchid Isle mystery series; Crime Fiction Lover spoke with Nick Quantrill, author of the Joe Geraghty novels, about his new title with a new protagonist – a young journalist called Yaz Moy; and Writers Who Kill interviewed Michael Rigg, whose debut novel, Voices of the Elysian Fields, features Jonathan Gray, M. D., Chief Deputy Coroner for Orleans Parish.
