Of Ferangs and Flash Fiction

• Michael Connelly (The Overlook, The Brass Verdict) has been confirmed as the keynote speaker during next month’s Mystery Florida conference in Sarasota, Florida. A news release gives a bit more information about the event:

Topics for this year’s forums will feature the Author as Director, Sidekicks, Red Herrings, Florida as a Character, Muse or Canvas, and the subject of Death itself and the many ways authors approach the Grim Reaper on paper. Cal Branch will present a workshop on the man who started it all, the incomparable and irascible John D. MacDonald, who penned best-sellers throughout the 1960s and ’70s from his Siesta Key bungalow, in between pub crawls and poker games with Florida writers MacDonald collected into a rogues gallery under the name of The Liars’ Club.

The Mystery Florida conference will be held June 6-7. For more information, go here.

• The new edition of Mystery News arrived in the mail this last weekend. Its cover story is about Katherine Hall Page (The Body in the Gallery), and inside there are pieces about the late Edward D. Hoch, Ariana Franklin (Mistress of the Art of Death), and Leighton Gage, who has launched an inviting new series starring Mario Silva, Chief Inspector for Criminal Matters of the Federal Police of Brazil (see Blood of the Wicked). All good stuff.

• Charles Benoit puts his latest novel, Noble Lies, through Marshal Zeringue’s Page 99 meat grinder and comes up with the following summation: “A couple ferangs, another man’s ‘whore’ and a pair of innocents all arriving at an exotic location in a Thai-style motorboat, being watched by a man who no one seems to notice--not the plot of the book, but yeah, a good sense of what it’s about.” Read more here and here.

• Favorable discoveries from the updated Bloodstained Bookshelf, ClueLass’ catalogue of crime fiction to come: Linda Barnes has another Carlotta Carlyle novel, Lie Down with the Devil, due out in August; in that same month, John Gardner’s fifth and apparently last Detective Sergeant Suzie Mountford, No Human Enemy, is due out in the States, along with Tiny Little Troubles, the new novel from Marc Lecard (Vinnie’s Head).

• After working well together on last year’s original audiobook, The Chopin Manuscript, Aubible Inc. and the International Thriller Writers are teaming up on a new promotional scheme that will have “a rotating roster” of (such as Janet Evanovich, Tess Gerritsen, and Steve Berry) recommending books that people ought to be reading ... er, listening to. Click here for the news release.

• James Bond isn’t just for “Bond girls” anymore.

• Kerrie Smith of Mysteries in Paradise rounds up her favorite female detectives “of the British kind” here.

• And here’s a new flash-fiction challenge from Patti Abbott, Gerald So, and Aldo “Mystery Dawg” Calcagno: “Write a story [of] 750 words or less incorporating the sentence, ‘With gas prices rising, their plans had to change.’ Post your story on your blog or Web site on June 15, 2008.” More details here.