Here, There, Everywhere

• Winners of the annual Audie Awards, given out by the Audio Publishers Association, have been announced. And in the Mystery category, The Tin Roof Blowdown, written by James Lee Burke and read for Simon & Schuster Audio by Will Patton, has walked away with the prize. This year’s commendation in the Thriller/Suspense category goes to Heart-Shaped Box, by Joe Hill and read for HarperAudio by Stephen Lang. In addition, the audiobook original The Chopin Manuscript captured Audiobook of the Year honors. Other winners and nominees here. (Hat tip to Elizabeth Foxwell). • Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 thriller, Vertigo, is the latest movie to be reconsidered at the excellent Noir of the Week site. Part I of critic Bill Hare’s assessment can be found here; part II is here. • I plugged the first part of Jeri Westerson’s coverage of last weekend’s Book Expo America gathering in Los Angeles, so should point out that her report’s second installment can be found here. • Clayton Moore’s new crime-fiction column in Bookslut has us reaching for our sunscreen, striped towels, and binoculars (with which to more easily check out the stitching on this year’s bikinis). It’s all about the beach books, baby. Moore recommends four new ones: Severance Package, by Duane Swierczynski; The Dawn Patrol, by Don Winslow; Chasing Darkness, by Robert Crais; and Mine All Mine, by Adam Davies (“Half James Bond technojoy with a good strong dose of romantic comedy”). Read about all of them here. • Blazing! Adventures Magazine is up with a slew of new stories, including continuations of two serials (The Curse of the Guadalajara Rose, by Sarah Black, and The Stieger Sanction, by C.J. Ferguson) and standalone pulp by T.J. Glenn and Robert Collins. • Peter Rozovsky reports here on Sunday evening’s “Noir at the Bar” event in Philadelphia, which starred Duane Swierczynski. • Cathi Unsworth writes in Pulp Pusher about her latest novel, The Singer, which is due for paperback release tomorrow. • There are a number of recent interviews with crime novelists available online: Tana French (In the Woods) in Publishers Weekly; Matt Beynon Rees (A Grave in Gaza) in The Jerusalem Post; Aifric Campbell (The Semantics of Murder) and Peter Clenott (Hunting the King), both in Crime Scene NI; Julia Spencer-Fleming (I Shall Not Want) in Mystery Morgue; and the ever-delightful Donna Moore (... Go to Helena Handbasket) is grilled by Angie Johnson-Schmit for the In for Questioning podcast. • During an interview with The Indianapolis Star, independent bookstore owner and author Jim Huang was asked what he thinks about the health of today’s mystery genre. His response:

Fundamentally, mysteries are about justice and order. A detective restores order by solving the case. ... Because they are so much about order, I think they’re about community as well. What I see happening now is that many publishers have come to the genre without respect for that tradition. They emphasize character and setting over plot. There are a lot of very sloppily plotted mysteries out there right now. I don’ think that’s good for the genre. In the long run, I think it undermines what people value about the books.

The full exchange can be found here. • What’s the status of the U.S. version of Britain’s popular TV cop drama, Life on Mars, now that star producer David E. Kelly has left the project? Nobody seems to know, according to TV Squad. • Yet more new James Bond tales? • Rhian Davies (aka CrimeFicReader) expands on her coverage of England’s literary Hay Festival for the BBC with a post today at her usual blog, It’s a Crime! (or a Mystery). In it, she provides a couple of interesting tidbits about Philip Kerr, whose latest Bernie Gunther novel, A Quiet Flame, is solidly among my choices (so far) for 2008’s best books. Despite critics applauding Flame, which is set partially in Buenos Aires, for its authentic atmospherics, Kerr concedes that he’s never actually been to Argentina. “Kerr also admitted that when reading he steals things all the time and learns a lot from reading,” CrimeFicReader writes. “For him, the two best writers in the 20th century were P. G. Wodehouse and Raymond Chandler.” The whole post can be found here. • And my fingers are crossed that Mark Twain’s home in Connecticut won’t be closed to the public before I even have a chance to visit there. Rotten luck, that.