Mystery Melange

PEN America is offering the opportunity to be in your next favorite book or show via an auction to win a chance to have your name or a loved one’s name in an upcoming work by one of the participating writers and receive a signed copy. All proceeds from the auction directly support PEN America's new Author Safety Program, a program designed to protect writers facing harassment, threats, and intimidation both online and in person. The participating crime fiction authors include Lee Child, David Baldacci, and Jean Hanff Korelitz. Emmy Award-winning writer and director Scott Frank (Dept Q, Monsieur Spade) will also name a character after you (or someone you love) in his next project if you're the highest bidder. The bidding closes on May 15th.


The Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania Mystery Bookshop's one-day iScream for Mysteries conference is back this Saturday, May 2, from 11-4. New and returning authors taking part include Laura Bradford, Ellen Crosby, Barbara Early, Robert Swartwood, and more, with panels, author trivia, and book signings. For registration information, follow this link.


The third annual Murder She Wrote Festival returns to Mendocino, California from May 1-3. The event celebrates the TV series starring Angela Lansbury as mystery writer-turned amateur sleuth, Jessica Fletcher, which ran for 12 seasons from 1984 to 1996, and was also continued in movies and tie-in novels written by various authors, including Donald Bain, Jon Land, Terrie Farley Moran, and Barbara Early. The heroine’s fictional hometown of Cabot Cove was actually Mendocino, at least for the show’s exterior scenes, including the Blair House Inn, which represented Jessica Fletcher’s home in Cabot Cove, Maine, where the series was allegedly set.


Three of the UK’s most celebrated crime writers, Clare Mackintosh, Vaseem Khan, and Cally (C.L.) Taylor, have joined forces with UK Finance’s Take Five to Stop Fraud campaign to create a trilogy of original short stories designed to help the public spot scams. Read Between the Lies uses the power of storytelling to bring fraud prevention to life - tapping into the nation’s love of crime fiction to expose how scams really work. Each story is inspired by real fraud tactics and encourages readers to "think like a detective" and apply the same instincts they use in crime books, TV, and podcasts to everyday situations. To find out more about the Take Five to Stop Fraud’s Read Between the Lies campaign and how to protect yourself from fraud, visit this link.


Mystery Writers of American revealed the winners of the Edgar Awards last night, and in honor of that occasion, Molly Odintz of Crime Reads asked nominees to contribute to a roundtable discussion on the state of the crime world today and to weigh in on the pleasures and pitfalls of the writing life. You can read part one of that roundtable here and part two via this link.


The Folio Society is presenting a newly illustrated edition of Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd to celebrate the novel’s 100th anniversary. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd was published in June 1926, six months before Agatha Christie famously vanished for eleven days. Proclaimed by the Crime Writers' Association as "the finest example of the genre ever penned," the title is consistently voted among Agatha Christie's best novels.  (HT to Shots Magazine)


On Art Taylor's "The First Two Pages" blog feature, he welcomed P.M. (Pamela) Raymond to talk about her linked-stories collection, Things Are as They Should Be and Other Words To Die For.


This week's crime poem up at the 5-2 Crime Poetry Weekly is "Senseless Acts of a Madman" by G. Emil Reutter.


In the Q&A roundup, author John Cheshire spoke with Crime Fiction Lover about his debut novel, System Lockout, which centers around a ransomware attack on National Health Services across London; Author Interviews spoke with Catherine Mack, the pseudonym for Catherine McKenzie, about This Weekend Doesn't End Well for Anyone, the new novel in her Vacation Mystery Series; and Deborah Kalb chatted with author/screenwriter Gregory Poirier, about his new Max Starkey thriller, A Thousand Cuts, and also with author/attorney Marc S. Perlman about his new espionage thriller, The Riddle of the Trees.