B.V. Lawson's Blog, page 32

Lefties Lead the Way

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The annual Left Coast Crime convention held this weekend in Bellevue, Washington, announced the winners of this year's Leftie Awards. Congrats to all the winners and finalists!

Lefty Nominees for Best Humorous Mystery Novel:  Wendall Thomas, Cheap Trills (Beyond the Page Books)

The other finalists:

Jennifer J. Chow, Hot Pot Murder (Berkley Prime Crime)
Lee Matthew Goldberg, The Great Gimmelmans (Level Best Books)
Leslie Karst, A Sense for Murder (Severn House)
Catriona McPherson, Hop Scot (Severn House)
Cindy Sample, Dying for a Decoration (Cindy Sample Books)

Lefty Nominees for Best Historical Mystery Novel :   Naomi Hirahara, Evergreen (Soho Crime )

The other finalists:

Cara Black, Night Flight to Paris (Soho Crime)
Bruce Borgos, The Bitter Past (Minotaur Books)
Susanna Calkins, Death Among the Ruins (Severn House)
Dianne Freeman, A Newlywed’s Guide to Fortune and Murder (Kensington)
Cheryl A. Head, Time’s Undoing (Dutton)
Naomi Hirahara, Evergreen (Soho Crime)

Lefty Nominees for Best Debut Mystery Novel :   Nina Simon, Mother-Daughter Murder Night (William Morrow)

The other finalists:

Lina Chern, Play the Fool (Bantam)
Margot Douaihy, Scorched Grace (Gillian Flynn Books)
Josh Pachter, Dutch Threat (Genius Book Publishing)
Ana Reyes, The House in the Pines (Dutton)

Lefty Nominees for Best Mystery Novel :   Tracy Clark, Hide (Thomas & Mercer)

The other finalists:

S.A. Cosby, All the Sinners Bleed (Flatiron Books)
Matt Coyle, Odyssey’s End (Oceanview Publishing)
Jordan Harper, Everybody Knows (Mulholland Books)
James L’Etoile, Face of Greed (Oceanview Publishing)
Gigi Pandian, The Raven Thief (Minotaur Books)

         Related StoriesTops in ThrillersAgatha AccoladesEdgar Excellence 

The Fingerprint Awards

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The London-based crime fiction convention Capital Crime has announced the shortlists for this year’s Fingerprint Awards. Mystery fans are invited to vote for the winners here, and the winners will be announced May 30th at the convention. (HT to The Rap Sheet) Congratulations to all, and let the voting begin!

Overall Best Crime Book of the Year

The Murder Game, by Tom Hindle (Century)

None of This Is True, by Lisa Jewell (Century)

The Secret Hours, by Mick Herron (Baskerville)

In the Blink of an Eye, by Jo Callaghan (Simon & Schuster UK)

Strange Sally Diamond, by Liz Nugent (Sandycove)



Thriller Book of the Year

Fearless, by M.W. Craven (Constable)

The Silent Man, by David Fennell (Zaffre)

The Rule of Three, by Sam Ripley (Simon & Schuster UK)

The Only Suspect, by Louise Candlish (Simon & Schuster UK)

The House Hunt, by C.M. Ewan (Macmillan)



Historical Crime Book of the Year

Death of a Lesser God, by Vaseem Khan (Hodder & Stoughton)

The Square of Sevens, by Laura Shepherd-Robinson (Mantle)

The Murder Wheel, by Tom Mead (Head of Zeus/Aries)

The Good Liars, by Anita Frank (HQ)

The House of Whispers, by Anna Mazzola (Orion)



Genre-Busting Book of the Year

Ink Blood Sister Scribe, by Emma Törzs (Century)

The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels, by Janice Hallett (Viper)

Killing Jericho, by William Hussey (Zaffre)

Murder in the Family, by Cara Hunter (HarperFiction)

The Looking Glass Sound, by Catriona Ward (Viper)



Debut Crime Book of the Year

Death of a Bookseller, by Alice Slater (Hodder & Stoughton)

The List, by Yomi Adegoke (Fourth Estate)

Geneva, by Richard Armitage (Faber and Faber)

The Bandit Queens, by Parini Shroff (Allen & Unwin)

Thirty Days of Darkness, by Jenny Lund Madsen (Orenda)



True Crime Book of the Year

No Ordinary Day: Espionage, Betrayal, Terrorism and Corruption—the Truth Behind the Murder of WPC Yvonne Fletcher, by Matt Johnson (Ad Lib)

My Girl: The Babes in the Woods Murders. A Mother’s Fight for Justice, by Michelle Hadaway (Penguin)

Vital Organs: A History of the World’s Most Famous Body Parts, by Suzie Edge (Wildfire)

Unlawful Killings: Life, Love and Murder: Trials at the Old Bailey, by Her Honour Wendy Joseph QC (Doubleday)

Order Out of Chaos: A Kidnap Negotiator’s Guide to Influence and Persuasion, by Scott Walker (Piatkus)



Audiobook of the Year

The Running Grave, by Robert Galbraith, narrated by Robert Glenister (Oakhill)

The Blackbird, by Tim Weaver, narrated by Joe Coen, Brendan McDonald, and Anjili Mohindra (Penguin Audio)

The Bedroom Window, by K.L. Slater, narrated by Clare Corbett (Audible)

Conviction, by Jack Jordan, narrated by Sophie Roberts (Audible)

Over My Dead Body, by Maz Evans, narrated by Maz Evans (Headline)

 

          

Friday's "Forgotten" Books: Five Passengers From Lisbon

Mignon G. Eberhart (1899-1996) was called America's Agatha Christie by her biographer, Rick Cypert, and was once the third highest paid female mystery writer (after Christie herself and Mary Roberts Rinehart). She was nothing if not a prolific writer, with 59 novels and numerous short stories, novellas and plays, many adapted for film in the 1930s and 1940s. It didn't hurt that she got an early start on her career as a teenager, mostly, as she later said,

"...because I preferred writing to studying Caesar's Commentaries and algebra. There was one halcyon period during which I traded work on English themes for the solution of geometry problems, with an obliging classmate, but, perhaps for the best, this was very brief. There was a long novel to which I could add chapters at will, and numerous plays, all of which were advisedly destroyed. In my early twenties I gathered up courage and postage stamps and sent a book-length typescript to an editor. It was accepted. The story was a murder mystery and thus started me on a hard but rewarding writing path. The writer hopes that a mystery novel is entertaining to read but it is not easy to write."

That first book was The Patient in Room 18, introducing nurse Sarah Keate and police detective Lance O'Leary (who both appeared in four more novels), later made into a movie starring Ann Sheridan and Patric Knowles. Female sleuths abound today, but it was still somewhat revolutionary for the time. Eberhart wasn't necessarily an early feminist, however—she said of her creation, "I loved her because she had a good sharp tongue." It was only a year after the publication of this book that Agatha Christie followed suit and introduced Miss Jane Marple for the first time in a novel. Another of her popular heroines was Susan Dare, a precursor to Jessica Fletcher of Murder She Wrote. Dare, quite possibly Eberhart's best creation, only appeared in short stories, some of which you'll find in the 2007 Crippen and Landru collection titled Dead Yesterday.



Eberhart's books primarily feature female heroines in often-exotic locations; in fact, her primary contribution is quite probably to the development of the romantic-suspense subgenre in crime fiction, one reason she's often said to resemble more Rinehart than Christie. Another reason for that comparison is Eberhart's dedication to character development and her interest in scientific detection, as seen through her nurse-protagonist and medical themes. Plus, Rinehart herself had her own Nurse Pinkerton.



Some contemporary readers will find formulaic elements and eye-rolling elements in Eberhart's novels, particularly the early ones where female heroines tend to show poor judgement and even faint (does anyone really faint all that often? Did they ever?), but she was adept with the elements of suspense and atmosphere in what Thrilling Detective said was "spare but almost lyrical" writing. Mike Grost added that that "suspense passages in Eberhart often show the heroine with a heightened sensory awareness of her surroundings, and are almost hallucinatory in their intensity."

[image error]These qualities are seen in her closed community mystery from 1946, Five Passengers From Lisbon. Five passengers and three crewmen survive a sinking Portugese cargo ship via a lifeboat, but when they're picked up by a U.S. hospital ship, the Portugese mate is found murdered. Against a backdrop of Portugal being a haven for espionage with undertones of Nazi and Resistance alliances, Eberhart spins a claustrophobic web first as the group floats in the darkness:

There were no signs of other lifeboats; although once a barrel floated past and they thought at first it was a man, and another time it was a man, on his face, dead when they reached him. Alfred Castiogne bent down to drag the floating, dark bulk a little out of the water, and to cast it back again. Marcia remembered the way his thick shoulders hunched over, and the moment while the boat drifted and Gili's whimper. But nobody said anything; it seemed too natural an event, so precisely and unexpectedly part of the pattern of the night.

and again along the dim windowless corridors and decks shrouded in fog:

The deck below seemed deserted, too. She reached the last wet black step and turned sharply around the stairway. But the deck was not deserted; it was, instead, horribly inhabited. Marcia stopped, holding the railing. The foghorn began again, so waves of sound broke over the deck, shaking the ship and all the impenetrable grey world about her with dreadful tumult. It kept on sounding, while Marcia stood, looking down at the dark swarthy little man who lay with his eyes no longer suspicious and wary but blankly open, staring upward. He was Manuel Para and his throat had been cut.   

A very long time seemed to have passed when suddenly she knew that someone was coming down the stairway immediately above her, following the steps her feet had taken. She looked up. It was a man in a red bathrobe. She could see him, and he had no face, but only white bandages with holes for eyes.

In H. R. F. Keating's Crime and Mystery: The 100 Best Books, he describes Mignon Eberhart as the heir and successor to Mary Robert Rinehart and a "star writer" in the first person single feminine tradition. Gertrude Stein described her as one of the "best mystifiers in America." She received the Scotland Yard Prize in 1930, became the Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of American in 1971, and 1979, received a MWA special Edgar to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the publication of her first novel.

          

Mystery Melange

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Book art by Frank Halmans

Friends of Mystery, a non-profit mystery organization based in Portland, Oregon, announced at their meeting on March 28 that Breakneck, by Marc Cameron (Kensington Books) is the 2024 Spotted Owl Awrd winner as the best mystery book written by the Pacific Northwest writer published in the previous year. The winning novel is the fifth one featuring Arliss Cutter, a U.S. marshal. (HT to The Gumshoe Site) Previous winners of the award include Robert Dugoni, Mike Lawson, Chelsea Cain, and more.

Left Coast Crime heads to Seattle beginning today and running through Sunday. Toastmaster Wanda M. Morris will be joined by Special Guests Megan Abbott and Robert Dugoni, along with a full lineup of panels, interviews, book signings, a silent auction, and the Lefty Awards banquet. There will also be a launch party and signing of this year's conference short story anthology, The Killing Rain.

Coming up Saturday, Apr 20 from 11am to 12pm, The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books will include the panel, "Welcome to the Underworld: Crime, Gangsters, and Hitmen." Authors scheduled to participate include Susan Straight, Gary Phillips, Lou Berney, Joe Ide, and Tod Goldberg. Later that day at 1:30, a panel on "Small Towns, Big Crimes in Noir and Crime Fiction," will include Jeffrey Fleishman, Brian Panowich, Jahmal Mayfield, and S. A. Cosby, and at 3:30, "Hell Hath No Fury: Powerful Women in Crime Fiction" will feature Amina Akhtar, Jessica Knoll, K.T. Nguyen, Karin Slaughter, and Natashia Deón. On Sunday, Barbara DeMarco-Barrett, Jordan Harper, Rachel Howzell Hall, Ivy Pochoda, and David L. Ulin will participate in "City of Fallen Angels: L.A. Noir" at 2pm, and "Crime Fiction: Series Sleuths" at 3:30 will feature Gregg Hurwitz, Eriq La Salle, Daniel Weizmann, Tracy Clark, Lee Goldberg, Seeley G. Mudd. For more details and ticket information, follow this link.

The Capital Crime conference in London coming up later this spring has a fun event scheduled for May 30th. "The Anatomy of a Crime: From Crime to Conviction" is a factual but entertainment-driven account of the timeline from crime to conviction presented by specialists in their field live on stage. Participants can experience crime scene briefings leading to a bite-size trial and have their say in whether the accused is guilty or should walk free. Participating author-actors will get to execute their real-life "day jobs" of Senior Investigating Officer, Detective, Crime Scene Investigator, Judge and Barristers. (HT to Shots Magazine)

Harrogate International Festivals has announced that Peter James will join the roster of Special Guests for the 2024 Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival taking place July 18-21. He joins authors Chris Carter, Jane Casey, Elly Griffiths, Erin Kelly, Vaseem Khan, Dorothy Koomson, Shari Lapena, Abir Mukherjee, Liz Nugent and Richard Osman in an all-star lineup curated by 2024 Festival Chair Ruth Ware. James is a globally bestselling author and the creator of the Detective Superintendent Roy Grace series, now a smash-hit ITV drama starring John Simm. James will be celebrating his milestone twentieth Roy Grace book at the Festival with an exclusive preview of One Of Us Is Dead, published by Pan Macmillan in September 2024.

Sisters in Crime New York is presenting a "License to Thrill" panel on April 17 from 6:30-8:00 pm via Zoom. Moderator (and SinC-NY Co-President) Lori Robbins will be joined by authors T. M. Dunn (Her Father's Daughter), television sports reporter turned crime fiction writer Elise Hart Kipness (Lights Out), Tim Maleeny (Cape Weathers series of mysteries), and Jodé Millman (Queen City Crimes Series). You can register in advance via the following link.

The latest adaptation (a TV series starring Sherlock's Andrew Scott) of Patricia Highsmith's Ripley books is once again generating interest in the crime author's works. The Guardian has a survey of where new readers to the author's work should begin, noting Highsmith’s skills "as an expert writer of guilt, ambivalence and moral dilemmas at odds with reality."

From the department of real-life horror and mysteries reflected in the annals of publication, Harvard announced it will remove binding made of human skin from 1800s book. The first owner of the book—a 19th-century French treatise on the human soul—took the skin from a deceased female patient without consent. After years of criticism and debate, the university announced that it had removed the binding and would be exploring options for "a final respectful disposition of these human remains." Although using human skin for book binding used to be less rare, especially among "gentlemen doctors," the practice fell out of favor in the early 20th century.

In the Q&A roundup, The Guardian spoke with Garry Disher about his sixty crime novels, surviving decades of "cultural cringe" and genre snobbery to make finally a decent sort of living, and also finding fame in his 70s; and Patricia Dunn, who writes under the pen name T.M. Dunn, chatted with Jill Amadio about her debut psychological thriller, Her Father’s Daughter.

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Author R&R with Thomas R. Weaver

[image error]After successfully launching a tech startup in the restaurant hospitality space which transformed payment and ordering experiences, Thomas R. Weaver realized he had no more excuses not to do what he always wanted to do: write fiction. Despite swearing to friends and family (none of whom apparently believed him) that he’d never run another startup again, he recently started another one focused on bringing some of the ideas to life in Artificial Wisdom, his debut novel, specifically around communicating in augmented reality. In Thomas’s spare time, he is an avid cook, and loves drawing, painting, and chess. Thomas collects more books than he has time to read, especially if they have beautiful covers, like Folio editions.

[image error]Artificial Wisdom is set in 2050, where a heat wave has killed millions across the Persian Gulf, including the wife of journalist Marcus Tully. But he has a lead like no other: the heat wave was unnaturally diverted from hitting the USA by geoengineering. The president who gave the order is now running for an even greater office: dictator of the nation states, with a short-term mandate to make hard decisions in order to prevent a climate apocalypse. His final opponent is the world's first AI politician, Solomon, governor of New Carthage, a domed city-state protecting the elite. Solomon's creator may have the evidence Tully needs to make his case to the world–but in the middle of the most important election in history, someone will do anything to stop the truth from coming out.

Thomas R. Weaver stops by In Reference to Murder to take some Author R&R about writing and researching the book:

Several weeks ago, I was listening to a new BBC Maestro talk by historical fiction bestselling author, Ken Follett, where he talked about the extensive research he had to do before writing a single word, to the point where for one of his books he spent nearly a year simply researching.

I don’t write that kind of fiction, and that kind of research would drive me mad. My books are mysteries, set in the future, for one thing. Detail is still important, but often my research focuses on how things work today, and how it might be extrapolated into the future.

For example, my debut novel, Artificial Wisdom, a murder-mystery technothriller, was set in 2050, where there has been huge technological progress even while we are on the verge of extinction. It’s a world full of augmented reality devices, super intelligence AI, global cryptocurrencies, new social networks and shifts in the way basic things (like news corporations) function.

How do you even go about building a new world? Educating myself on the macro-trends was the easy bit: not only are there countless non-fiction books to dig into covering each of these subjects, but documentaries, articles, podcasts, Wikipedia pages and more. Writers thirty years ago would have had to camp out in libraries and travel to research, or perhaps consult their trusty home encyclopaedia. Now, we have it all at our fingertips. We probably have the opposite issue: for any one thing we need to know, there’s almost too much information available, and you could study any one thing for years of your life. However, I subscribe to the Aaron Sorkin method of character and plot development: the backstory only emerges as you need it, and so the question becomes researching enough to make things authentic, but not too much that the detail is no longer useful, maybe even detracting from the narrative.

Creating a murder-mystery set in the future presents all sorts of challenges. It’s often said that the 1990s, and the rise of the mobile phone, changed how authors put their characters in jeopardy. The smartphone, with its ability to track locations and be tracked, has changed it even more so. Writing a complex murder-mystery set 30 years from now meant firstly figuring out what technology was going to be possible in the future, and then finding potential loopholes in it. For example, what if automatic cleaning bots cleared up your crime-scene before the police got there?

For me, researching, then, is really à la carte. I’ll be in the middle of writing a scene, and will decide the best thing my character could do right now is, say, go into an underground speakeasy. In Baghdad. In 2055. Fine, but is that even possible? And I’ll go and spend an hour of my life learning what kind of rock ancient Baghdad is built on (limestone), do they have cellars (some) and if you had limestone stairs leading down, would they get slippery with age (yes)? One hour, for perhaps three words most eyes will jump over, but more importantly the validation that I technically could have an underground speakeasy in a future version of Baghdad, and that the character can go there.

Or perhaps a plot point will depend on how cryptocurrencies actually work, and I’ll need to actually speak to an expert about it. We live an incredible time where we can reach almost anyone on social media, although that doesn’t mean they’ll always want to talk to you. When writing my book, I directly consulted experts on climate, geoengineering, augmented reality, cryptocurrency and many more things, usually on very specific snippets to make sure I was being accurate.

ChatGPT has changed the game on this, and has certainly replaced Google for me as my first search tool. I can clearly remember the moment that changed everything for me. In my second book, my protagonist is trying to save someone who has just lost a limb. They need a tourniquet, and don’t have a lot around them to use. I started to Google makeshift tourniquets. I can’t remember what I searched for, now, but I can tell you know that if I’d really needed information in a hurry, my patient would have bled out on the floor before I found anything. There was a lot more about what not to do, than what to do. Asking ChatGPT the question immediately gave me some solid suggestions I was then able to verify externally.

Last week I needed to know how brush motors were made, and how they worked. What were all the individual parts, and what order might they be put together? Googling it was very challenging, since amateurs don’t just make brush motors in their garage, and if they do it comes with the assumption you already know a lot of basic information about electromagnetism. I tried a ChatGPT prompt: “Explain to me all the individual components of a universal washing machine motor as if I know nothing about it, but am going to build one from scratch”, and got a succinct list of all the parts and how they fit together.

Now, no-one who isn’t going to build a brush motor themselves really wants to know all that, but my character knows, and needed to build one, from recycled parts, in a hurry. There’s a fantastic episode of the podcast Writing Excuses (S3E1) on Worldbuilding, where authors Brandon Sanderson, Howard Tayler and Dan Wells explain what’s going on here. They call it smoke and mirrors, the magic trick that creates the illusion things are real, just enough detail to suggest things are credible without providing the entire text of Wikipedia.

When it comes to it, the point of all this research is to add an illusion of authenticity to an imaginary story. We don’t need to put in all the detail, but suggest it, like an impressionist painter. Fiction triggers brain activity like you’re a participant, not an observer, and the brain is great at filling in the gaps, so as authors our job is to maintain that illusion and keep people in the story, ideally helping them learn something new along the way.

 

You can learn more about Thomas R. Weaver via his website and follow him on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Threads, and TikTok. Artificial Wisdom is now available via all major booksellers.

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Media Murder for Murder

[image error]It's the start of a new week and that means it's time for a brand-new roundup of crime drama news:

THE BIG SCREEN/MOVIES

Shout! Studios has acquired North American rights to The Wasp, a psychological thriller starring Academy Award nominee Naomie Harris (Moonlight) and Natalie Dormer (Game of Thrones). Adapted from the play by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm and directed by two-time BAFTA nominee Guillem Morales (Inside Number 9) in his English-language debut, the film will be released in theaters this summer. In The Wasp, Heather (Harris) and Carla (Dormer) agree to meet after having not spoken in years. Over tea, Heather presents a very unexpected proposition that will change their lives forever, in a plot "evoking such classic cat-and-mouse thrillers as Sleuth and Deathtrap."

Netflix's film division has preemptively acquired a pitch for an untitled law school thriller from Holland, Michigan screenwriter, Andrew Sodroski. While plot details are unknown at this time, the pitch is said to be described as a contemporary spin on The Firm meets The Wolf of Wall Street.

Production has wrapped on Bring the Law, an action-thriller that marks the directorial debut of actress Scout Taylor Compton (2007’s Halloween). The film stars Oscar nominee Mickey Rourke (The Wrestler), Peter Facinelli (Twilight), Nicky Whelan (The Flood), Danielle Harris (Halloween), Brendan Fehr (Roswell), and Leah Pipes (The Originals). The film follows a grieving homicide detective who is chosen to lead a task force in Los Angeles to stop a criminal organization. He soon unravels a conspiracy involving corruption in his own department.

TELEVISION/SMALL SCREEN

In a competitive situation, Berlanti Productions and Warner Bros. Television acquired the rights to Matthew Blake‘s debut crime thriller novel, Anna O, which is in the process of being set up at Netflix for development. The story follows Dr. Benedict Prince, an expert in sleep-related homicide, as he investigates the inexplicable case of Anna O, who murdered two people in cold blood four years ago and hasn’t awakened since. The tabloid press dubs her "Sleeping Beauty," but as Anna shows the first signs of stirring, Dr. Benedict must determine what really happened that night and whether or not she should be held criminally responsible for her actions when she finally wakes up.

Captain Marvel writer-directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck are set to direct the first four episodes of Prime Video's Criminal, a drama based on the award-winning graphic novel series created by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips. Brubaker, who penned the pilot script, co-showruns with crime fiction author Jordan Harper (Hightown). The TV show is described as an interlocking universe of crime stories, or as Brubaker explained to Deadline, "Criminal tells the interweaving saga of several generations of families tied together by the crimes and murders of the past."

Amid strong ratings, ABC has renewed the procedural drama Will Trent, starring Ramón Rodríguez, for a third season. Based on Karin Slaughter’s bestselling novels, the series follows the titular special agent of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation who was abandoned at birth and endured a harsh coming-of-age in Atlanta’s overwhelmed foster care system. Now, Will uses his unique point of view to pursue justice and has the highest clearance rate in the GBI.

MGM+ has dropped a teaser trailer for the 1970s crime thriller, Hotel Cocaine, and revealed its remaining cast. The premiere of the 8-episode series will be available on June 16 on MGM+, with new episodes airing on Sundays until August 4. Hotel Cocaine tells the story of Roman Compte (Danny Pino), a Cuban exile and general manager of the Mutiny Hotel, the glamorous epicenter of the Miami cocaine scene of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. The Mutiny Hotel was Casablanca on cocaine; a glitzy nightclub, restaurant, and hotel frequented by Florida businessmen and politicians, international narcos, CIA and FBI agents, models, sports stars, and musicians.

PODCASTS/VIDEO/RADIO/AUDIO

Speaking of Mysteries welcomed Don Winslow to talk about City in Ruins, the third and final installment of his Danny Ryan trilogy, in what he says is his final crime fiction novel.

Author Philip Gwynne Jones chatted with Crime Time FM's Paul Burke about his thrillers, The Venetian Candidate and The Venetian Sanctuary; Venice; honorary consuls; and Italy.

Meet the Thriller Author spoke with Dana Perry, an award-winning author of crime fiction and a journalist in New York City where he has had a long career as a top editor at the New York Post, New York Daily News, Star magazine and NBC News. The first three novels in his new Nikki Cassidy series, starting with The Nowhere Girls, were published this month.

The Cops and Writers podcast featured the conclusion of an interview with Louis Ferrante, a former member of the Gambino Crime Family who is now an international bestselling author, television producer and director, and Vic Ferrari, podcaster, author, and a retired NYPD detective.

On Read or Dead, Katie McLain Horner and Kendra Winchester discussed some books with a perfect sense of humor.

The latest Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine podcast episode featured a celebrated story from the March/April 2022 issue, Anna Scotti's "Schrodinger, Cat," a Macavity Award nominee and third place finisher in the EQMM 2022 Readers Award poll.

THEATRE

The eighth annual Leeds Opera Festival in the UK will feature the first ever operatic adaptation of Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes and The Sign of Four, a brand new opera by award-winning composer Liam Paterson. The overall theme for this year's festival is crime and adventure and will also include an interactive mystery show for children.

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Friday's "Forgotten" Books: The Dancing Man

Philip Maitland Hubbard, better known as P.M. Hubbard (1910-1980) studied at Oxford where he won the Newdigate Prize for English verse in 1933.  From Oxford he moved into the Indian Civil Service in northwest India, returning to England in 1947 to work for the British Council. Hubbard then turned to freelance writing — at first, short stories and poetry for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, some articles and, oddly, Parliamentary reports to Punch magazine, before finally focusing on writing novels full time. He penned 16 suspense/mystery titles from 1963 to 1977 with modest success, although one of his novels, High Tide, was adapted for television as part of the ITV network's Armchair Thriller series in 1980.



Hubbard's work is particularly known for his settings, mostly small rural villages or lonely isolated houses in places like secluded woods, along the coast, or in the Highlands. Hubbard once wrote that "As to my planning of a book, the plain answer is that I don't. I have some general theme in my head, and I marry that to a place (always imaginary, but imagined to the last detail and compass-point). The place is generally in fact the principal character in the book, because, again, places mean more to me than people. However, I start with the one or two characters necessary to carry the theme, and then I just start writing and see what happens."



His writing style is direct, minimalist and terse, which Anthony Boucher once noted: "Avoiding clichés as much as possible, interested in people yet devoid of sentimentality, without even any overt physical action, Hubbard can suggest untold horror in a few deft passages." Some may find this type of writing to be slow by today's standards, as Hubbard draws out the suspense quietly and gradually, like slowly playing out a guide rope until it suddenly snaps.



Hubbard didn't create any series characters or detectives, using only three or four main characters in each story, with little dialogue and large chunks of interior monologue narration from the POV character.  The Dancing Man, from1971, is what Tom Jenkins of Mystery File noted was the epitome of Hubbard's style:  a limited cast of characters, his sparse dialogue, and his plot complexities, all woven into the settings of an isolated Victorian house in Wales, a ruined Cistercian abbey and a Neolithic ring larger than Avebury and older than Stonehenge.



The lead character of The Dancing Man is Mark Hawkins, engineer, cynic and loner, who has always resented his adventurer-archaeologist brother, Dick. Then Dick vanishes, allegedly dead in a climbing accident. A reluctant Mark starts investigating the site his brother was excavating, a Cistercian monastery, and meets three strange souls who were the last to see his brother alive — gruff professor Roger Merrion, who has more than an academic interest in the ruins, his fearful young wife, and his enigmatic virginal sister, whom Mark starts to fall for.  The Dancing Man of the title is a pornographic carving at the ancient ruins that begins to exert an influence on Mark, but is it witchery, as a mysterious old man he meets tells him, or is something altogether real, but equally sinister? And why was his brother working at an 11th-century monastery, when his specialty was Neolithic archaeology?



It's definitely not the type of novel for fans of more modern, fast-paced punchy fiction, but if you're in the mood for a dark psychological story, then you can allow The Dancing Man to reel you in slowly as you become immersed in the almost claustrophobic pull of the protagonist's frame of mind as he gets closer to a murderous secret.

          

Mystery Melange

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Phone Book Paper Dress by Jolis Paons

Mystery Writers of America announced the 2024 recipients of the Barbara Neely Grants: Ashley-Ruth M. Bernier and Audrea Sallis. The grants program is named after the late Barbara Neely, author of one of the first crime fiction series to feature a Black woman as the protagonist, and is awarded annually to two Black crime fiction writers, one already published and another just getting started in publishing. The grant comes with a $2,000 award to assist each recipient with any aspect of their career as they see fit.

Meanwhile, each year, Sisters in Crime awards researchers grants of up to $500 for the purchase of books to support research projects that contribute to our understanding of the role of women or underrepresented groups in the crime fiction genre. Applications will be reviewed by a committee of scholars familiar with scholarship on the genre. The deadline for submissions is April 30, and for more information and to apply, follow this link.

The deadline is fast approaching for submissions to the Danger Awards 2024 sponsored by the BAD Sydney Crime Writers Festival. Applicants must be living Australian citizens or permanent residents, and all books must have been first published (traditionally or self-published) between January 1 and December 31, 2023 to be eligible. Four awards will be presented: one for best crime fiction, one for best crime fiction debut, one for crime non-fiction, and thanks to the generous sponsorship of OverDrive Australia, a People’s Choice award will be presented covering all three categories. Interested parties must fill out the online submission form no later than 5pm on May 6, 2024. The shortlist will be announced July 30, with winners announced September 14.

As part of the Oxford Conference for the Book in Oxford, Mississippi, there will be a closing special event, "Noir at the Bar: A Gathering of Crime Writers and Music Makers," this Friday, April 5, at the Ajax Diner, 118 Courthouse Square. Authors scheduled to take part include Ace Atkins, William Boyle, Colin Brightwell, Tom Franklin, Derrick Harriell, Max Hipp, Lisa Howorth, David Joy, Tyler Keith, Clair Lamb, Tobi Ogundiran, Bea Setton, and Michael Farris Smith, with music by Kell Kellum and Bark.

On Friday, April 15 at 7pm, you can tune in for a lively conversation with Lisa Gardner (Still See You Everywhere), Robert Dugoni (A Killing on the Hill), Anne Hillerman (Lost Birds), and Carter Wilson (The Father She Went to Find), with Lisa Black serving as emcee. Although participants must register, the event is free and includes the chance to win one of the authors' novels. Be among the first 100 in the Zoom room, and you’ll have the opportunity to personally debrief the authors, or you can catch them on Facebook Live and interrogate them via comments. As an added treat, you can also sample each author’s favorite snack and drink, with their notes and recipes, with dining and drinking commencing at the start of the show. To check out the event, the recipes, and to register, follow this link.

Book publishing deals are generally too many to cover on a regular basis, but this one is a bit unusual: Antony Johnston, co-creator of The Coldest City/Atomic Blonde, Three Days in Europe, Wasteland, and the Dog Sitter Detective books, had five publishers bid on his new crime novel. The premise of the book is also unusual, an interactive solve-as-you-go-along conceit, or as Johnston explains, "Throughout the book the reader chooses who to interview and which leads to follow, taking notes and looking for clues before finally deciding who to accuse. Every decision the reader makes has consequences. If you remember 'gamebooks' (Choose Your Own Adventure, Fighting Fantasy, etc) you'll recognise the concept for Can You Solve the Murder? It's a game in which you play a detective solving a crime… but also a murder mystery novel, with plot twists and great character."

In an instance of crime meets art, artist and ink-maker Thomas Little uses an unexpected source for colors to make his scenes even more potent: The pigments are made from the chemical compounds of guns, taken out of circulation and dissolved in Little’s workshop. As CNN reported, "for more than five years, Little has performed this kind of alchemy, purchasing handguns and automatic rifles from pawn shops and dissolving the iron-heavy parts in acid to form iron sulfate, the basis for writing inks and artists’ pigments in deep blacks, rusty reds and warm ochres. As the son of a gunsmith, this practice is something of a birthright for him, but entirely subversive as he transforms objects of violence into materials for expression."

In the Q&A roundup, Lisa Haselton chatted with mystery author Dana King about his new private eye crime fiction, Off the Books, and also with mystery author Phyllis Gobbell about her new amateur sleuth novel, Notorious in Nashville; Holly Jackson spoke with The Guardian about her young adult series, A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder, which has sold millions of copies worldwide, and is currently being made into a BBC TV series; and Crime Reads interviewed SJ Rozan and John Shen Yen Nee, co-authors of The Murder of Mr. Ma, which introduces a Holmes and Watson inspired dynamic duo consisting of two semi-fictionalized Chinese historical figures—Judge Dee Ren Jie from the 7th century, whose valorous spirit has been mythologized in countless stories, and the 20th century academic and novelist Lao She—who work together (if reluctantly, at first) to track down a serial killer targeting Chinese immigrants in post-WWI London.

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Short But Sweet

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The Short Mystery Fiction Society announced this year's finalists for the Derringer Awards. Since 1998, the SMFS has awarded the annual Derringers—after the popular pocket pistol—to outstanding published stories. The awards recognize outstanding stories published during 2023. Results of membership voting are scheduled to be posted on May 1, 2024. Congratulations to this year's finalists!

 

FLASH

“Sleep Rough” by Brandon Barrows (Shotgun Honey, September 19, 2023)
“The Referee” by C. W. Blackwell (Shotgun Honey, October 12, 2023)
“To Whom It May Concern by Serena Jayne” (Shotgun Honey, January 9, 2023)
“Teddy’s Favorite Thing” by Paul Ryan O’Connor (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Sept/Oct 2023)
“Supply Chains” by Andrew Welsh-Huggins (Black Cat Weekly #89)

 SHORT STORY 

“Denim Mining” by Michael Bracken (Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, May/June 2023)
“Dogs Of War” by Michael Bracken & Stacy Woodson (Mickey Finn: 21st Century Noir Volume Four, Down & Out Books)
“Last Day At The Jackrabbit” by John Floyd (The Strand, May 2023)
“I Don’t Like Mondays” by Josh Pachter (Mystery Magazine, July 2023)
“Judge Not” by Twist Phelan (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, May/June 2023)
“A Tail Of Justice” by Shannon Taft (Black Cat Weekly #114)

LONG STORY

“Hard Rain On Beach Street” by C. W. Blackwell (Killin’ Time in San Diego, Down & Out Books)
“Reversion” by Marcelle Dubé (Mystery Magazine, April 2023)
“Back To Hell House” by Nick Kolakowski (Vautrin, Fall 2023)
“Troubled Water” by Donalee Moulton (Black Cat Weekly #75)
“It’s Not Even Past” by Anna Scotti (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Sept/Oct 2023)
“Good Deed For The Day” by Bonnar Spring (Wolfsbane: Best New England Crime Stories, Crime Spell Books)
“Ignatius Rum-And-Cola” by Andrew Welsh-Huggins (Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Jan/Feb 2023)

 NOVELETTE

“Vengeance Weapon” by James R. Benn (The Refusal Camp: Stories by James R. Benn, Soho Press)
“Mrs. Hyde” by David Dean (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, March/April 2023)
“The Case Of The Bogus Cinderellas” by Jacqueline Freimor (Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, July/Aug 2023)
“Madam Tomahawk” by Nick Kolakowski (A Grifter’s Song, Down & Out Books, 2023)
“Catherine The Great” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (WMG 2023 Holiday Spectacular Calendar of Stories)

          

Author R&R with Larry and Rosemary Mild

[image error]Rosemary Mild, a graduate of Smith College and former assistant editor of Harper's, and Larry Mild, a digital systems and instrument designer for major government contractors in the signal analysis field, are also cheerful partners in crime. They have coauthored the popular Paco & Molly Mysteries, the Dan and Rivka Sherman Mysteries, the Hawaii adventure/thrillers Cry Ohana and Honolulu Heat, and three volumes of short stories, many of which appear in anthologies. Making use of his past creativity and problem-solving abilities, Larry naturally drifted into the realm of mystery writing, where he also claims to be more devious than his partner-in-crime and best love, Rosemary. So he conjures up their plots and writes the first drafts, leaving Rosemary to breathe life into their characters and sizzle into their scenes. A perfect marriage of their talents.

[image error]Their latest novel is Kent and Katcha: Espionage, Spycraft, Romance. The year is 1992. The Soviet Union has collapsed, but danger persists. Young Kent Brukner, a freshly trained American spy, arrives in Moscow for a high-risk mission: to infiltrate and compromise a Russian Federation Army facility. Under an alias, in a military uniform, he plies his skills—unprepared for the brutal confrontations and irrational consequences. Kent meets the innocent and passionate Katcha, daughter of a British expatriate and a Russian dissident, and together the lovers embark on a nearly impossible journey, beginning in the foothills of the Ural Mountains. Stalked by the evil Major Dmitri Federov, they must escape from St. Petersburg to Helsinki, Finland, or face life in a Russian prison. Kent also faces a personal choice—will he choose his spine-tingling career or the woman he loves?

Larry and Rosemary Mild tag-team some Author R&R at In Reference to Murder today:

LARRY:

I divide research into two types: general and specific. I find general research good for broadening the mind and great for nonfiction writers, who have to impart to their readers that they are experts on the subject. But it’s wasteful for fiction writers. In writing fiction, authentic description is highly supportive, but it must never trump the plot. Going overboard with minute details interrupts the action, leaving the reader thinking, Get to the story already.

So…what is great for the fiction writer? I call it specific research. It means including just enough detail and facts to convince you, our readers, that you are in the scene with the characters. For our new novel, Kent and Katcha: Espionage, Spycraft, Romance, I determined in advance what I thought I would need.

Rosemary and I have a workable routine for starting each new project. I make up the plot and write the first draft. The complex plot of Kent and Katcha takes place in Russia just after the USSR broke into a myriad of tough-to-pronounce countries. I had the spy part pretty well down already, as I had been a senior design engineer for a defense manufacturer who supplied the intelligence agencies for many years. I actually met a few government contract managers who were once field agents—spies forced to come in from the cold. I’d even been to the locale where field agents were trained. In the performance of my work, I visited many secure military and civilian facilities. I knew what I could write and what I could not write about. I had a fair knowledge of recent Russian history from my dutiful reading of the Washington Post every morning. We own an atlas that has given me an overall picture of Russian geography. My initial concept of the plot was espionage, capture, escape, chase. I’d seen enough movies that I could create an authentic prison camp with its typical flaws. I’d also docked in enough harbors from my years with the U.S. Navy. All of this knowledge helped me start our novel.

For certain, I would need a batch of authentic Russian names, both male and female, as well as a train and bus map of western Russia. I selected Helsinki, Finland, as the ultimate destination for our hero and heroine. So I had to research both Helsinki and St. Petersburg, Russia, in more detail, as well as the modes and schedules of transportation between them. Addresses, famous sights, and foods were also looked into as needed. As the plot progressed, I sought a number of common Russian expressions that I salted throughout the text to give it the right flavor. But these had to be in the transliterated form of the Cyrillic Russian or my readers would not have recognized them. Airports, hotels, cafés, street names—all had to be looked up. The research did not end with me. Rosemary continued to find color for some of the stops on the journey. She also, as always, fleshed out the characters and intensified scenes for dramatic effect.

Fortunately, all  the research I needed was on the Internet. I enjoy researching there. An old adage says, “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” Hogwash! I’m ninety-one and I feel you never get too old to learn new things.

ROSEMARY:

First, I have to tell you I’m dazzled by Larry’s background. We’re married thirty-six years, a second marriage for us both, and I still learn more about him and his past every day. I love how he applies his knowledge and experience to our stories. I also must tell you that Kent and Katcha was the toughest novel I’ve ever worked on. Neither of us has been to Russia or Helsinki. I made some of the research my own domain focusing on 1992, such as the cars in both countries; what the Helsinki harbor and U.S. Embassy looked like; the weather and what clothes the characters were wearing during the months of the story. All with intent to give authenticity to our scenes.

How We Handled Research in Some of Our Other Fiction

We sold a copy of Locks and Cream Cheese, our first Paco & Molly Mystery, to the Hawaii State Library. The acquisitions librarian asked me: “Where did you get your research?” “Oh,” I said with a chuckle, “Larry made it all up! He got the historical details out of his head, based on all the historical novels he’d ever read.”

In Death Goes Postal, our first Dan & Rivka Sherman Mystery, we created the Olde Victorian Bookstore in Historic Annapolis, Maryland, eight miles from our house. We strolled around the quaint neighborhood to make sure we got the street names right. (Of course, that’s not necessary whenever we make up a fictional locale.) In Death Steals A Holy Book, we had to locate an English translation of a rare Yiddish volume that Larry inherited (on which he built a mystery plot). We found it in a bookstore in Brooklyn, New York. Then we had to track down the rabbi who translated it and get his permission to quote from it.

Our most popular novel is Cry Ohana, Adventure and Suspense in Hawaii. We spent twenty years in Hawaii as snowbirds from Maryland (before moving here eleven years ago). Young Kekoa witnesses a murder and is running from the killer. We loaded the novel with local scenes based on our own experience—but always pushing the story forward. In Chinatown on Chinese New Year, we waded through spent firecracker paper, then turned that night into a chase scene with the killer stalking Kekoa. On the Big Island, we witnessed dangerous volcanic steam vents and incorporated those into the plot. We have a character in the hospital with a head wound. His wife had clobbered him with a crystal ashtray. We called the Honolulu Police Department for how they deal with spouse abuse, and applied those details.

Sometimes our research plays an astonishing role, as in Copper and Goldie, 13 “Tails” of Mystery and Suspense in Hawaii. (Goldie is the golden retriever who helps catch bad guys.) In our short story “The Snake Lady,” Auntie Momi visits her fortune teller, but finds her dead—murdered—and Heki, her gentle pet python, missing. Wait a minute! Snakes are illegal in the Aloha State. Detective Danny groans, “Not another reptile. No matter how hard we try, the black market thrives.” I called the Hawaii Department of Agriculture and learned that the penalty is up to three years in prison and a $200,000 fine. But there’s an amnesty plan: Voluntarily turn in your reptile, no penalties. Our research was satisfying, but our plot was at a standstill. It was missing an irrefutable piece of evidence that would nail the killer. A happy personal coincidence solved our problem—and the case. A cousin of ours, a jewelry designer, had just posted her newest creation on Facebook: an exotic snake ring! With her permission, we incorporated the ring into our plot. It led to the killer.

But here I echo Larry. We only include the research that enriches the plot, fits the characters’ behavior, and contributes to the pacing and suspense.

How I Got Carried Away Doing Research—with Dire Consequences

As a student at Smith College, I spent my Junior Year Abroad with the Smith Group in Geneva, Switzerland. For the school year 1955-56, we attended the University of Geneva. Our group leader was a Smith Professor of Government. He fitted his own course into our schedules, American Foreign Policy. We had no tests, just one term paper, requiring us to answer this question: “Was the United States justified in entering the Korean War?” I spent glorious hours doing my research at The League of Nations Library in Geneva. Sitting at a table in the  reading room, I could hardly concentrate. The view was exquisite. Azure blue Lake Geneva, and in the distance, the snow-covered Swiss Alps. I proudly turned in my twenty-page paper a day before the deadline. One week later, our papers were handed back with our grades. I stared in shock at mine: a big fat red C, accompanied by the professor’s comment. “Rosemary, amid all your research, you forgot to answer the question: Was the United States justified in entering the Korean War? That was the entire assignment.” 

A Little Research Goes a Long Way

Research is always a judgment call—so tempting to show off how much you know. Elmore Leonard, author of Get Shorty and other popular novels, said: “Don’t go into great detail describing places and things. Even if you’re good at it, you don’t want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.”—From his New York Times article “Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points, and Especially Hooptedoodle.”

 

To learn more about the Milds and their books, visit their website, or follow them on Facebook or LinkedIn. Kent and Katcha: Espionage, Spycraft, Romance is available via all major booksellers.

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