B.V. Lawson's Blog, page 220

What a Writer Really Wants

I've always had a soft spot for Snoopy, and this is one of my favorite strips featuring the irreverent pup.

Media Murder for Monday

MOVIES

If you're headed to the Toronto Film Fest, Deadline has a rundown of the films that will be featured, including Life of Crime, based on Elmore Leonard's novel The Switch, about two common criminals in 1970s Detroit (played by John Hawkes and Mos Def) who kidnap the housewife (Jennifer Aniston) of a corrupt real estate developer (Tim Robbins) and hold her for ransom; Mystery Road, about a detective who returns to his outback hometown to investigate the brutal murder of a teenage girl found in a drain under a highway outside of town; and Prisoners, starring Hugh Jackman as a father who takes the law into his own hands after his young daughter goes missing.

Judge Dredd star Karl Urban told Comic Con that the movie "exploded" on home video, selling 650,000 units in the first week, prompting him and producer/screenwriter Alex Garland to plan a sequel. The original film was based on a popular comic strip and focused on a violent, futuristic city where the police have the authority to act as judge, jury and executioner, leading a cop to team with a trainee to take down a gang that deals a reality-altering drug.

Fight Club is getting a sequel—as a graphic novel. Author Chuck Palahniuk, on whose work the 1996 Brad Pitt film was based, said, "Chelsea Cain has been introducing me to artists and creators from Marvel, DC and Dark Horse, and they're walking me through the process. It will likely be a series of books that update the story 10 years after the seeming end of Tyler Durden."

Via Omnimystery News:  Tribeca released a trailer for the thriller A Single Shot, adapted from the novel by Matthew F. Jones, about a hunter who becomes the hunted in the backwoods of West Virginia.

TELEVISION

ABC has put in a development order for Lawless, about a maverick lawyer who returns to her hometown to right the wrongs she left behind. It is inspired by the real life of crusading trucker-turned-lawyer Wynona Ward, founder of Have Justice Will Travel, which provides free legal representation and support services to victims of domestic violence in rural areas.

ABC also announced a limited series about the Cold War, based on the book Circle of
Treason: A CIA Account of Traitor Aldrich Ames and the Men He Betrayed, scheduled to premiere in 2014.

Jack Wagner (The Bold and the Beautiful), Rachel Blanchard (Clueless) and Cameron Mathison (All My Children) have been tapped to star in a Hallmark two-hour backdoor pilot and potential primetime series, My Gal Sunday. The project is based on the book of short stories by Mary Higgins Clark about attorney/PI Sandra "Sunday" O'Brien-Parker (Blanchard) and her new husband/partner Henry Parker (Mathison), whose deep political ties and romance put them at the center of intrigue and scandal.

Sherlock season three has cast its nemesis for Benedict Cumberbatch's sleuth. Lars Mikkelsen (who appeared in the original Dutch series The Killing) will play Charles Augustus Magnussen, who is likely based on a character from one of Arthur Conan Doyle's short stories about a murderous blackmailer.

Ruth Bradley (Big Thunder) and Boardwalk Empire alum Meg Steedle have been added to the cast of the World War II sci-fi/crime drama from executive producer Gale Anne Hurd. Horizon centers on a secretary (Bradley) at the FBI who discovers that her husband might have been killed in a battle with a spaceship in the South Pacific. Steedle will play the secretary's best friend and a refined debutant-turned-upper-level FBI secretary.

Michelle Forbes (who played a Dionysus-worshiping immortal on HBO's True Blood and a grieving mother on
AMC's The Killing), has landed a recurring role in the NBC
drama Chicago Fire. Forbes will play a high-ranking consultant with the State Fire Marshal's office.

Terrence Howard has joined M. Night Shyamalan's limited series for Fox, Wayward Pines, playing a Sheriff who takes offense when Secret Service agent Ethan Burke (Matt Dillon) comes
in to town to investigate the disappearance of two agents.

There were many sneak previews of the upcoming 2013-14 television season at the recently-wrapped ComicCon, incuding a panel about Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Although the panel didn't include footage, it did have actors like Clark Gregg (Agent Phil Coulson) and Ming-Na Wen (Agent Melinda May), as well as pilot director Joss Whedon talking about the project. You can see a portion of the panel at CinemaBlend.

ABC released a few first looks at the surprises coming up in season 6 of Castle. New cast members include House star Lisa Edelstein as a tough Fed whom Beckett wants to emulate (she'll appear in at least three episodes) and Myko Olivier as Pi, whom Alexis (Molly Quinn) met in Costa Rica.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO

The July 27 edition of Suspense Radio featured author Marcus Sakey, Toni Hill, and Dan Graffeo.

THEATER

New casting was announced for the National Theatre's West End production of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, currently running at the Apollo Theatre, with the new company to begin performances Sept. 2. The play was adapted by Simon Stephens from Mark Haddon’s best-selling novel of the same name about a 15-year-old amateur detective with Asperger's Syndrome.

Mystery Melange

Book sculpture by Guy Laramee


Denise Mina was honored with a rare repeat performance as winner of the Theakston Old Peculier Best Crime Novel Award for the second year in a row. Her novel Gods and Beasts edged out other nominated books by Mark Billingham, Chris Ewan, Peter May, Stuart Neville and Stav Sherez.

Needle Magazine's Summer Issue is available for the Kindle, bringing you noir short fiction at its best: Dennis Tafoya, Sarah Weinman, Clayton Lindemuth, Brad Green, Bruce Holsinger, Kieran Shea, Ed Kurtz, Jimmy Callaway, Scott Miles, C.J. Edwards, Amy Yolanda Castillo, Alan Orloff, B.A. Hoffman, and Neliza Drew. Back issues (including the Winter 2012 issue with my story "Push Comes to Shove") are also available.

After the recent Scandinavian invasion in crime fiction, there have been attempts by publishers around the world to take advantage of that success and put forth their own regional crime novels as "the next big thing." The latest in that line is French crime fiction, but the French may have weight to back it up: the Crime Writers Association awarded the 2013 International Dagger (a tie) to French authors Fred Vargas, for The Ghost Riders of Ordebec, and Pierre Lemaitre for Alex.

Bookvibe is looking to be the "next big thing" in online book discovery sites, competing with the likes of Goodreads, Library Things and Shelfari. The site offers up book recommendations to users by extracting data from their Twitter handle and may add recommendations from Facebook, Tumblr, and Instagram (and even Goodreads and LibraryThing) down the road.

In the Q&A roundup this week, Jesse Giles Christiansen chats with Dark Phantom Review about his new novel Pelican Bay; Margaret Coel discusses her Wind River Mysteries with Omnimystery News; Jason Matthews talks to Omnivoracious about his spy career and how his debut novel, Red Sparrow , had to be fine-tooth-combed by the CIA's "publication review board"; and Jeff Pierce has a lengthy interview with prolific author Ed Gorman, originally for January Magazine, which Jeff reposted on his Rap Sheet blog.

Heads up to you bookstores out there. Researchers in Belgium discovered that shoppers are more likely to engage in leisurely
browsing—and ultimately purchase books in certain popular genres,
including romance novels—if the store is infused with the scent of
chocolate. I could have told them that.

1+1 = A Mystery

I first posted this on the blog five years ago to celebrate my father's 80th birthday. Sadly, we lost him to cancer this past February, but I thought it might be a nice tribute to re-post this one more time in honor of a man who taught college math for 55 years, up until a year before his death. I don't know how many thousands of students he taught during that time, but many of them have gone on to teaching positions of their own, and so Papa's legacy continues on in each and every student down the line.

This is a look at the mysteries of math, i.e.,
crime fiction works that have used math or mathematicians as a central
theme.

It might surprise some to realize how often math and mathematicians
have been used throughout the history of the genre. The father of the
modern mystery, Edgar Allan Poe, brought the subject
into his 1845 short story "The Purloined Letter," in which C. Auguste
Dupin solves the case and engages the Prefect of Paris in a discussion
of mathematics and the nature of reasoning. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,
who once told a reporter that Poe's Dupin "is the best detective in
fiction," made Professor Moriarty, the archenemy of Sherlock Holmes, a
mathematician.

Other giants of the genre followed suit, with S.S. van Dine’s Philo Vance in 1929's The Bishop Murder Case,
which deals with a series of killings in the house of a senior
mathematics professor where most of the victims and suspects are
mathematicians. Agatha Christie in The Bird with the Broken Wing 1930),
has her protagonist Mr. Satterthwaite deal with "a most brilliant
mathematician" who had authored a book "totally incomprehensible to
ninety-nine hundredths of humanity." Even Rex Stout’s Nero Wolf crossed paths with a mathematician in two stories, And Be a Villain (1948) and The Zero Clue
(1952) where a mathematician uses operations research to solve
mysteries and may be usurping Wolfe's reputation in the process, until
he's promptly murdered.

When it comes to series fiction, there have been fewer takers. A few novelists have taken on the task, the most prolific being John Rhode,
one of the pen names of Cecil John Charles Street (1884-1964). His
protagonist Dr. Lancelot Priestley, a British mathematician and former
professor who was forced to resign after an argument with university
authorities, was featured in fifty books, starting with The Paddington Mystery.
His writing is fairly representative of the Golden Age of detective
fiction, but the writing utilizes an understated sense of humor (two of
his books included murder committed respectively with a squash and
hedgehog). 

Patricia McElroy (P.M.) Carlson, who taught
psychology and statistics at Cornell University before deciding that
mystery writing was more fun, has published books with different
protagonists, but her first featured a New York professor of statistics,
Maggie Ryan. Carlson penned eight works in the series, starting with Audition for Murder in 1985 and ending with Bad Blood in 1991. 

Erik Rosenthal is another intrepid author who
created a mathematical hero in Dan Brodsky, who obtained his Ph.D. from
the mathematics department at U.C. Berkeley in 1976, teaching part-time
and working part-time as a P.I.  Rosenthal’s two books featuring
Brodsky, The Calculus of Murder (1986) and Advanced Calculus of Murder
(1988) include an inside look at life on the Berkeley campus in the 60s
and 70s. They also feature an unlikely pet, the guinea pig Hypatia
(named after the female Greek mathematician), and a romantic interest
for Brodsky in the form of Eileen St. Cloud, a mathematician on the
faculty at Rice University.

Desmond Cory, the pseudonym used by British mystery
and thriller writer Shaun Lloyd McCarthy, is best-known for his British
secret agent, Johnny Fedora and the TV and movie screenplays.  But his last-published
works are a series of four novels with protagonist John Dobie,
Professor of Mathematics in Cardiff, Wales (known as "Columbo with a
chair in mathematics"), starting with Strange Attractor in
1991.  Although some mathematicians might take exception with Cory's
claim that mathematicians are terrible cooks the series manages to bring
in a blend of chaos and set theories, logic, and probability,
especially in The Catalyst. (1991)

There are many other stand-alone mysteries featuring mathematics,
although not as many from an academic standpoint. One of the most
unusual would have to be After Math (1997) by Miriam Webster,
the non de plume of Amy Babich, a Ph.D. in mathematics. Her book
features the ghost of math professor Ray Bellwether who tries to solve
the mystery of his own murder. Along the way he crosses paths (so to
speak) with other curious mathematicians, some living, some dead.

Another contemporary, and unconventional work, is the brainchild of Jeff Adams,
a 2005 short story published in "Math Horizons." It's titled "Cardano
and the Case of the Cubic" and is a parody of the stereotypical early
20th century hard-boiled PI, set within the framework of 16th century
mathematician Gerolamo Cardano. ("That's what had me worried. Girls with
quiet elbows can't be trusted. I deduce these things. I'm a
mathematician. My name's Cardano.")

And you don't have to look much farther than your TV to see how mathemathics can be used in criminal detection—the CBS drama Numb3rs, which tried to make math sexy, was one of the network's most popular shows during its five seasons from 2005-2010.

How Do You Create Suspense?

That was the question put to a panel at the recent 2013 ThrillerFest. Moderator
Barry Lancet and panelist-authors Daryl Gerber (aka Avery Ames), Ethan Cross, Patrick Lee, Dan Mayland, Chris Pavone, Maggie Sefton and Carol Shenol have published a combined 31 books and have 51 years of collective writing experience. This snippet has the panelists discussing ways they try to create suspense, techniques that are basic but important to keep in mind.

Friday's "Forgotten" Books - The Man Who Didn't Fly

This is a little "classic" Friday's Forgotten Books for you.

Scottish author Margot Bennett was born in 1912 and worked first first
as a copywriter in the UK and Australia and then as a nurse during the
Spanish Civil War before turning to writing. Her output in crime fiction
was relatively small, yet successful: The Man Who Didn't Fly was shortlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger and was runner-up to Charlotte Armstrong's A Dram of Poison for Best Novel at the Edgars in 1956, and she won the Gold Dagger two years later in 1958 with Someone from the Past. She was also chosen to contribute a short story to the second CWA anthology, Choice Of Weapons, edited by Michael Gilbert.

But
thereafter, a bit of mystery regarding Bennett herself began. She
essentially stopped writing crime fiction, something discussed by Martin
Edwards both and in the foreword he wrote for the Black Dagger Crime Series edition of The Man Who Didn't Fly. Bennett only wrote for television for awhile—including the early 60s UK adaptation of the Maigret novels by Simenon—with the exception of two non-mystery books (one of which had the intriguing title The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Atomic Radiation), before abandoning writing altogether in 1966. She died in 1980 at the age of 68.

In The Man Who Didn't Fly,
four men are scheduled to take an ill-fated chartered flight to Dublin
that crashes into the Irish Channel. Although the bodies can't be
recovered, it becomes evident that only three men were on board the
plane, yet all four are reported as missing. Inspector Lewis and
Sergeant Young have their work count out for them trying to coax clues
out of unreliable witnesses including the Wade family, Charles and his
daughters Hester and Prudence.

The lives of the Wades intersected with all four of the missing men:
Harry Walters, a desperate poet, who was in love with Hester Wade;
Joseph Ferguson, a businessman who wife was more interested in Harry;
Morgan Price, a nervous guest of the Wades; and Maurice Reid, something
of a family friend. Slowly but surely, Lewis and Young piece together
the details of the days leading up to the flight, finally uncovering the
name of the missing man. But that just sets up a new problem: what
happened to him and why?


Bennett's artful plotting was enough to capture the attention of the producers of NBC's Kraft Television Theater who created an episode in 1958 based on The Man Who Didn't Fly starring then 27-year-old William Shatner, Jonathan Harris (Dr. Smith of Lost in Space)
and Walter Brooke (guest star in just about all TV series in the 60s,
70s, and 80s). The book was also chosen by Julian Symons as part of his
1958 "100 Best Crime Stories" for the London Sunday Times.

Media Murder for Monday

MOVIES

Sony has opted not to adapt the third installment, The Lost Symbol, of Dan Brown's Robert Langdon thriller series as the next movie in its franchise. Instead, star Tom Hanks and director Ron Howard will be reuniting for Brown's novel Inferno, set in Europe and inspired by Dante, author of the 14th century poem The Divine Comedy. They're aiming for a release date of December 2015.

Although CBS passed on the Beverly Hills Cop TV series spin-off, showrunner Shawn Ryan is working with Paramount to put the failed-pilot into development as a movie. There's no word on whether the pilot's stars Brandon T. Jackson and Christine Lahti will be a part of the film.

Lotus Entertainment and Davids Canton Production are teaming up for an adaptation of the psychological thriller Restart based on Matthew Klein's novel No Way Back (published this spring by Corvus). Brad Anderson (The Call, The Machinist) has signed to direct the film, which focuses on an ordinary man who discovers his entire life is being infiltrated and manipulated by a terrifying criminal network. (Hat tip to Omnimystery News.)

Vladimir Kulich (The Vikings) has joined the film reboot of the 1980s television series The Equalizer. Kulich will play a Russian oligarch who funds an international black market enterprise, in opposition to star Denzel Washington's former covert agent who hires himself out to those in need.

Here's your first look at Academy Award winning actor Sean Penn in the adaptation of Jean-Patrick Manchette's thriller novel The Prone Gunman (retitled The Gunman for the film). Penn plays Jim Terrier, an international operative forced to go on the run.

TELEVISION

The Emmy Award nominations announced last week include include nods for Outstanding Drama to Breaking Bad, Downton Abbey, Game Of Thrones, Homeland, House of Cards and Mad Men. There are several other crime drama-related nominations, but all of them are for cable networks (or Netflix) and none for broadcast networks. For the full listing, check out this listing from Cinemablend.

Imagine Entertainment (Ron Howard and Brian Grazer) and 20th Century Fox have picked up rights to Andrew Gross's No Way Back for a television series, according to a notice the author posted on his Facebook page.

The Sundance Channel has chosen the series The Red Road (f/k/a The Descendants) for its second original scripted series. The show is described as "a hard-hitting drama that revolves around Harold Jensen, a sheriff struggling to keep his family together while simultaneously policing two clashing communities: the small town where he grew up and the neighboring Ramapo Mountains, home of the Ramapo Mountain Indians."

As Omnimystery News reported, ABC has renewed its summer drama Rookie Blue for a fifth season. (ON also has a Telemystery Scoresheet to keep track of the status of your favorite shows.)

The CBS sci-fi thriller Person of Interest has promoted Amy Acker and Sarah Shahi to series regulars for Season 3, as was announced at a recent Comic-Con panel. Root plays a talented assassin and cyber-hacker for hire who is intent on setting the Machine free, while Shahi plays a fearless operative in a secret paramilitary organization that tracks and eliminates terrorists.

The musical episode of USA's comedy-detective series Psych, featuring Tony Award winner Barry Bostwick and Anthony Rapp, is scheduled to air in December. Playbill has a trailer.

Charlie Hunnam is in talks to star in Triple Nine, a cop drama that Anonymous Content is developing, and Christoph Waltz and Cate Blanchett are also in the running to join the cast. The thriller was written by Matt Cook and focuses on a group of thieves in L.A. who plan to kill a cop (a "Code 999" in police parlance) to divert attention from their own crime scene across town. 

AMC released a trailer for its upcoming "film noir" series, Low Winter Sun, about two detectives (Mark Strong and Lennie James) who murder a dirty cop in their department.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO

On CBS This Morning last week: Robert Kolker, author of Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery.

THEATER

The full cast was announced for the return of the Jonathan Church-helmed production of Bertolt Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. Performances in Chichester's Minerva Theatre in the UK begin August 15, before moving to the West End's Duchess Theatre. The play is set in Chicago in the 1930s, where the Great Depression is the perfect time for Arturo Ui and his mob of gangsters to run protection rackets for both workers and businesses.

GAMES

The makers of the original Police Quest video game hope to resurrect the police procedural adventure with Precinct via a Kickstarter project. The game will include puzzles and mysteries as well as planned action sequences like shootouts, car chases, and foot pursuits. The developers are hoping for a June 2014 release.

Friday's "Forgotten" Books - 100 Dastardly Little Detective Stories

Robert Weinberg is the author of more than twenty-five books, many of them dealing with science and pop culture, and Stefan Dziemianowicz is an independent scholar and writer and expert on pulp fiction. Together they teamed up with the late Martin H. Greenberg to edit 100 Dastardly Little Detective Stories, part of the "100" series published by Barnes and Noble in the 1990s and reprinted about ten years later.

The stories selected for this anthology run the gamut from the classics, by O. Henry ("The Mystery of the Rue de Peychaud"), Charles Dickens ("An Artful Touch"), Bret Harte ("The Stolen Cigar-Case"), and Jack London ("The Leopard Man's Story") to more modern practitioners such Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzini. Writing styles cover most of the bases, from hard-boiled to the more Sherlockian-thoughtful detectives.

As with most anthologies, there are a few hits and a few misses, but this particular grouping is interesting due to the inclusion of those classic authors who aren't always associated with detective writing, as well as many unknowns. There's also a contribution from none other than Abraham Lincoln, "The Trailor Murder Mystery," which first appeared on the front page of the Quincy Whig in 1843. Coming in at 576 pages, it's not exactly "light" reading in weight, but there are plenty of gems that will make for an entertaining, but quick, read.

Mystery Melange

Book sculpture by Bronia Sawyer


The indie publisher L&L Dreamspell has released many print and digital books in various genres, including crime fiction, for the past seven years. The endeavor was the dream of good friends Linda Houle and Lisa Smith (hence the publisher's name), and I was very fortunate to have them publish two of my Scott Drayco stories in one of their anthologies. Sadly, I received news that Linda Houle passed away last week following a long and courageous battle with breast cancer. Remaining partner Lisa Smith doesn't feel she can continue the venture, so the company is closing down. Although I don't know of any memorial funds set up so far, I'm sure the American Cancer Society would welcome donations in Linda's memory.

In happier news, the 2013 Thriller Awards were handed out this past weekend at ThrillerFest in New York City. Congratulations to


Best Hardcover Novel - Brian Freeman, Spilled Blood (SilverOak)
Best Paperback Original - Sean Doolittle, Lake Country (Bantam)
Best First Novel - Matthew Quirk, The 500 (Reagan Arthur Books)
Best E-Book Original Novel - CJ Lyons, Blind Faith (Minotaur Books)
Best Young Adult Novel - Dan Krokos, False Memory (Hyperion Books CH)
Best Short Story - John Rector, “Lost Things” (Thomas & Mercer)


The Strand Magazine Critics Award winners were also announced: the Award for Best Novel went to Defending Jacob by William Landay; the Critics Award for Best Debut Novel went to The 500 by Matthew Quirk; and Faye Kellerman was given the Lifetime Achievement award for excellence in crime writing. 

A record 61 books are in contention Sisters in Crime Australia's 13th Davitt Awards for the best crime and mystery books by Australian women in 2012. The winners will be presented at gala dinner on August 31 by leading New Zealand crime writer, Vanda Symon, at the Thornbury Theatre in Melbourne. For all the nominees in the various categories, check out the SinC Australite website link above.

The summer edition of Mystery Scene Magazine is out, which editor Kate Stine sums up thusly: "From the rousing derring-do of Susan Elia MacNeal's WWII espionage to the thoughtful examination of China's headlong modernization in Qiu Xiaolong's Inspector Chen police procedurals to Elaine Viets' darkly amusing take on the US economy in her Dead End Jobs mysteries, this jumbo issue of Mystery Scene will kick your summer reading into high gear."  There are many more features, too, and the usual great columns and reviews.

ThugLit Issue #6 is "ready to blow up your face with eight killer tales from some of the best crime writers on the mutherlubbin' PLANET." Stories include "Pin" by Hugh Lessig; "Wheels" by Rena Robinett; "Come on Home" by Scott Adlerberg; Having Chiqui" by Kieran Shea; "Soul Collection" by T Fox Dunham; "Sweet Caroline" by Jessica Adams; "The Ghost Wife" by Aaron Fox-Lerner; and "Rogues Gallery" by BH Shepherd

Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine returns with its July/August 2013 issue, presenting the best in modern and classic mystery fiction, with columns from Lenny Picker and Mrs Hudson, plus original short fiction from Marc Bilgrey, Carla Coupe, Paullette Gaudet, Janice Law, Nijo Philip, Jack Grochot, Laird Long, Jay Carey and John M. Floyd.

Elizabeth Foxwell, editor of Clues: A Journal of Detection, wanted to remind everyone that the submission deadlines are approaching on two Clues Call
for Papers: the global crime scene (July 19) and Tana French and Irish
crime fiction (Aug 1). The magazine does, however, consider essays outside of these
themes on an ongoing basis. Check out the website for more details and guidelines.

The biannual NoirCon has opened submissions for the literary journal Noir Riot, to be published in conjunction with the festival in 2014 in Philadelphia. The goal is to "offer a comprehensive, up-to-the-minute examination of the noir universe, with contributions from both rising stars and authors of worldwide renown, and sections dedicated to fiction, nonfiction and poetry." For guidelines and submission periods, check out the Noir Riot website.

Publisher Tony Burton of Wolfmont Press has announced a call for submissions for the company's latest charity anthology, Hungry for Justice. He's  looking for stories from 2,000 to 3,000 words in length that explore crime and punishment in the less-affluent portions of America. Proceeds from the anthology will be donated to Feeding America, an organization that deals with the issues of hunger and food insecurity that many people in America face each day. (Hat tip to Terrie Moran at Women of Mystery, who just signed a three-book deal for a series on her Read 'Em and Eat Cafe mystery series with Berkley.) Tony posted submission info on Dropbox.

The Telegraph and publisher Harvill Secker are joining forces to launch a new competition in crime fiction for UK residents. But even if you're not submitting to the contest. The Telegraph is going to feature some of Harvill Secker's most successful crime authors conducting masterclasses on the paper's website over the next several weeks, in both written and video form.

In an era when it seems there is a bookstore closing every week comes word that a new indie bookstore focusing on science fiction, fantasy and mystery is opening in the Astoria neighborhood in New York City. Enigma plans on having a backyard garden where customers can lounge and read
outdoors, as well as hosting  events like murder
mystery nights, "geek" trivia competitions, spoken word performances,
screenings of old sci-fi movies, reading groups, and literacy classes
for kids.

What Makes You Put a Book Down?

Goodreads surveyed its many thousands of members to see which books were abandoned the most often and the reasons why (looking at reader self-reported review and bookshelf details). They compiled the details in an infographic, a helpful reminder to authors on how to keep readers interested.