Mystery Melange

Japanese author Keigo Higashino, a prolific writer best known for his numerous hit mystery novels and lauded for his intricate plotting and creativity, has died at the age of 68 after a bout with cancer. Higashino penned 106 books in his lifetime and is best known in the English-speaking world for his novel, The Devotion of Suspect X, which follows a brilliant high school mathematics teacher who architects what he believes to be a perfect crime, only to be challenged by his equally brilliant physicist friend. He was awarded the prestigious Naoki Prize in 2006 for the title, along with the Honkaku Mystery Awards, among the large number of awards he received or was nominated for during his lifetime.


The International Association of Media Tie-In Writers announced the winners for the 2026 Scribe Awards, which acknowledge and promote those working in this often overlooked and underrepresented area of publishing and the entertainment industry. In the Best Original Novel – General Fiction category, the top nod went to Ian Fleming’s Felix Leiter: The Hook and the Eye by Raymond Benson. Other crime fiction-related titles in that category included Return of the Maltese Falcon by Max Allan Collins and Murder, She Wrote: The Body in the Trees by Terrie Farley Moran. Barbara Early was also a finalist with Murder, She Wrote: Snowy With a Chance of Murder in the Best Graphic Novel category. The winners were unveiled at this month's San Diego ComicCon.


This Saturday, August 1, at 2pm CDT, Eleanor Taylor Bland (1944-2010) will be inducted into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame at the Woodson Regional Library. Bland was known for her sixteen police procedural novels featuring suburban detective Marti MacAlistor. The series began with 1992’s Dead Time and concluded with 2005’s A Dark and Deadly Deception. She also wrote short stories and edited Shades of Black, an anthology of crime and mystery stories written by Black authors, and served as president of Sisters in Crime. SinC has named its annual Eleanor Taylor Bland Award for Crime Writers of Color in her honor.


The inaugural Annapolis Noir at the Bar heads to Forward Brewing, 418 Fourth Street, in Annapolis, Maryland, on August 5, starting at 7 pm. Forward will make drinks and snacks available for purchase, each author will do a short reading, and the Salty Girls Books mobile truck will be on head for book sales. Authors scheduled to participate include Jennifer van der Kleut, Lacey N. Dunham, Kathleen Barber, Minday Carlson, Nik Korpon, Vera Kurian, and E.A. Aymar.


Kevin Tipple's Thursday Treats blog column (here and here) recently featured a look at new crime short stories including some via Black Cat Weekly and the new anthologies, What the World Needs Now: Mystery Stories Inspired by the Music of Burt Bacharach (Level Best), and Crime in the World: Locked Room Mysteries and Impossible Puzzles (Crippen and Landru).


Art Taylor's "The First Two Pages" blog featured an essay by Victor De Anda, discussing his short story, “Bad Man Down,” which originally appeared at the blog The Yard in October 2024 and was included in The Best American Mystery & Suspense 2025.


This week's crime poem up at the 5-2 Crime Poetry Weekly is "Jack, the Hack Carjacker."


In the Q&A roundup, Crime Fiction Lover spoke with Nicole Lundrigan about her new psychological thriller, The Case Study; Deborah Kalb chatted with Mindy Carlson about her new mystery, Her Dying Day, inspired by the famous disappearance of Agatha Christie; Jon St. Denis (pseudonym for J. Sydney Jones) applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, Killer Art, about a pair of newbie academics who find themselves reluctant sleuths and even more reluctant targets when a fellow professor turns up dead; and George Pelecanos was interviewed by Crime Fiction Lover about returning to his series with private eye Derek Strange after fourteen years away, in the new novel, The Blue Flame.