The Washington Center for the Book announced the finalists for the 59th annual Washington State Book Awards on Tuesday. The awards honor outstanding books published by Washington authors in 2024. This year, there were 42 finalists in seven categories, with the winners in each to be announced Sept. 16. The Best Fiction category includes the crime novel, Rough Trade by Katrina Carrasco, which was also named a Best Crime Novel of 2024 by The New York Times Book Review.
Despite all the craziness in D.C. right now, the 2025 Library of Congress National Book Festival is full steam ahead for on Saturday, September 6, at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center. Among the mystery and thriller events are a discussion about "Justice on Trial" with Ron Currie (The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne) and Scott Turow (Presumed Guilty); and Liz Moore (The God of the Woods) and Chris Whitaker (All the Colors of the Dark) in conversation about their blockbuster novels, which both are both set in the 1970s and feature missing people. There will also be book signings by these authors and many more.
Thirty-five years, ago, Jim Sanborn created a coded message within Kryptos, a sculpture stationed in a courtyard at the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia. The piece, a meditation on secrets in a house of secrets, has fascinated and bedeviled professional and amateur cryptologists since its dedication, and over the years, the first three panels were cracked by code breakers within the C.I.A., a California computer scientist, and the National Security Agency. The fourth panel has remained unsolved—until now. In an auction on November 20, Sanborn will provide the answer to the remaining code to the highest bidder. Along with the original handwritten plain text of K4 and other papers related to the coding, Mr. Sanborn will also provide a 12-by-18-inch copper plate that has three lines of alphabetic characters cut through with a jigsaw, which he calls “my proof-of-concept piece." His ideal winning bidder is someone who will hold on to that secret.
Sad news to report: After 42 years, the always humorous Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, founded in 1982 at San Jose State University in California, has announced its retirement. It's the brainchild of Professor Scott Rice, who had to write a seminar paper on a minor Victorian novelist and chose Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, author of the novel, Paul Clifford. That novel began with the famous "purple prose" opener that has been plagiarized repeatedly by the cartoon beagle, Snoopy, "It was a dark and stormy night." You can still read the contest archives online, which includes the winning entries for the Crime & Detective category through the years, as well as this entry, which won the Grand Panjandrum's Special Award last year: "Mrs. Higgins’ body was found in the pantry, bludgeoned with a potato ricer and lying atop a fifty-pound sack of Yukon golds, her favorite for making gnocchi, though some people consider them too moist for this purpose."
This week's crime poem up at the 5-2 Crime Poetry Weekly is "Give and Take" by Angela McClintock.
In the Q&A roundup, Lisa Towles was interviewed by the Writers Fun Zone about her technothrillers, with the latest, Switch (the third installment in the E&A Investigations Thriller Series), out next month; and Writers Who Kill's E. B. Davis spoke with with Alyssa Maxwell about Murder At Arleigh, the thirteenth book in the Gilded Newport Mystery series.
