Missing Them Already

• Today brought the shocking news that British author Mo Hayder (born Clare Dunkel) died on Wednesday from motor neurone disease. She was 59. Hayder rose to fame following the release of Birdman (2000), which introduced Detective Inspector Jack Caffery, destined to return in six subsequent novels (the last being 2014’s Wolf). As The Bookseller recalls, Hayder’s fiction-writing efforts were much-applauded: “Her fifth novel, Ritual, was nominated for the Barry Award for Best Crime 2009 and was voted Best Book of 2008 by Publishers Weekly. Gone, her seventh novel, won the Edgar Allan Poe Award, and her novel Wolf was nominated for Best Novel in the 2015 Edgar Awards and is currently being adapted for the BBC. In 2011 she was awarded the Crime Writers’ Association Dagger in the Library award for an outstanding body of work.” Earlier this year, Mo Hayder let it be known that she was starting to pen speculative thrillers rather than crime works; her debut novel in that genre, The Book of Sand—to be published by Century under her pseudonym, Theo Clare—is expected to reach bookstores early in 2022.

• Missouri-born performer William Smith, who died on July 5 at age 88, spent some three-quarters of a century in front of cameras. “Mr. Smith had more than 300 acting credits listed on IMDb from 1954 to 2020,” The New York Times explained in its obituary. “He did many of his own stunts, and sometimes those scenes got heated. He was throwing punches with Rod Taylor for the 1970 film Darker Than Amber when the two began fighting each other for real. Both walked away with broken bones. ‘Now that was a good fight,” Mr. Smith recalled in a 2010 interview with BZ Film.” My recollections of Smith’s work date back to the 1974 pilot for The Rockford Files, in which he appeared as a karate expert/killer who Jim Rockford cleverly bests in a public-bathroom scene. “According to Ed Robertson’s history of The Rockford Files,” writes Nathan Ward in his 2020 Rockford tribute for CrimeReads, “this scene nearly broke the ASI meter when the pilot was tested, and may have made the show. It did for me. By cheating a little, it seemed a clever man could take down a bully. I was hooked.” A bodybuilder and champion discus thrower in his real life, Smith will also be remembered for his screen presence in shows such as Longstreet, Columbo, Mission: Impossible, Ironside, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, City of Angels, Rich Man, Poor Man, and Hawaii Five-O.

• Sadly gone now, too, is William F. Nolan, the 93-year-old author and screenwriter mostly widely recalled for co-writing the 1967 novel Logan’s Run with George Clayton Johnson. That dystopian science-fiction yarn was turned into a 1976 film of that same name, starring Michael York and Jenny Agutter. Although much of Nolan’s prose fell into the sci-fi and horror genres, The Gumshoe Sites notes that he was also an authority on Black Mask and Dashiell Hammett:

He penned Dashiell Hammett: A Casebook (McNally & Loftin, 1969), one of the pioneer books on Hammett, and won the 1970 Special Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America ... He updated the Hammett bio/bibliography and published Hammett: A Life at the Edge (Congdon & Weed, 1983). He also created a future private eye on Mars named Sam Space, maybe a descendant of Sam Spade, introduced in Space for Hire (Lancer, 1971), which was nominated for the 1972 … Paperback Edgar but did not win. He edited The Black Mask Boys (Morrow, 1985), an anthology of short stories from Black Mask Magazine, and wrote the three books of the Black Mask Boys series featuring a different Black Mask writer in each book: The Black Mask Murders (1994, with Hammett); The Marble Orchard (1996, with Raymond Chandler); and Sharks Never Sleep (1998, with Erle Stanley Gardner; all three from St. Martin’s).

Nolan, born in Kansas City, Missouri, perished on July 15.

• Finally, Kevin Tipple alerts me to the recent passing of George Wier, the Austin, Texas-based author of a series of mysteries starring investment counselor-cum-crime-solver Bill Travis (The Long Goodnight, Armadillo Waltz) as well as standalones such as 2015’s Errant Knight. I haven’t spotted an obituary published anywhere that tells how old he was, but Tipple relates that Wier had been “dealing with liver and esophageal cancer.” His family announced on Facebook that a “celebration of life” will be held in Wier’s honor on Sunday, August 1, at Austin’s Church of Scientology Texas.

Making the Most of Diverse Histories

By Fraser Massey
Most authors don’t start out as writers. They serve time in other careers first. But what’s the most useful professional background for a crime novelist? Could it be the law? Two of Britain’s most successful recent debutante crime novelists, both of whom are now making waves in the United States, too—Abigail Dean and Nadine Matheson—are London-based lawyers. They met last week before a virtual audience on Facebook. (You can enjoy the full video here.)



Dean has hit the New York Times bestsellers chart on one side of the Atlantic and the Sunday Times list on the other with her harrowing psychological thriller, Girl A (published by Viking [U.S.] and HarperCollins [UK]), about abuse and survival. But during her appearance as part of First Monday Crime, a regular British forum for fans of fiction with a bloodthirsty edge, she said that having made a substantial mark in one career was no help in giving her the self-confidence to expect she could do as well in another.

“I do remember … having a lot of self-doubt,” Dean confided to viewers during that hour-long Zoom presentation. “I needed a bit of a cheerleader. So I gave the first few chapters to my husband, who loves reading. … His first kind of comment was sort of a bit of like happy disbelief. ‘It’s like a real book that you would buy in a shop.’ I think that was the moment which, although it was a questionable compliment, looking back it was a much-needed boost.”

If the law had not helped Dean believe she could become a fiction writer, it at least gave her useful background when it came to creating Girl A’s central protagonist, New York lawyer Lex Gracie.

Matheson, whose serial-killer police procedural, The Jigsaw Man (published by Hanover Square Press in the States on March 16, and already available in the UK from HQ), has drawn more than its fair share of plaudits, took a different approach to Dean. “I didn’t want to write about a lawyer,” she said. “I do [lawyer stuff] every day.” Instead, she used her professional knowledge to write about crime from a police perspective. “I’m a solicitor. I specialize in crime, so I know how a police investigation works. I know what it’s like to deal with defendants and witnesses. … I have that background, so hopefully I’ve been able to put authenticity into the book.”

Her one regret was having a significant gap in her personal background of working with criminals. “I’ve never, to my knowledge,” she explained, “represented a serial killer, but—and this sounds really sick—I would have liked to. Just to experience it.”

Even so, critics have been impressed with how she’s pieced together her serial killer the Jigsaw Man. American crime-fictionist J.T. Ellison (All the Pretty Girls, Her Dark Lies), a major champion of Matheson’s novel, has described its author as “the heir apparent to Mo Hayder and Thomas Harris.” It’s a view echoed by critic Geoffrey Wansell in his critique of the novel for Britain’s Daily Mail, which described The Jigsaw Man as having “chilling echoes of Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs.”

“I’m still stunned by [the comparison],” said Matheson. “That’s like the pinnacle [of praise]. I read Silence of the Lambs when I was 14. I’ve read Mo Hayder. To have this book, that I didn’t think was that great when I wrote it, to have it compared to Harris and Hayder—that’s like the icing on the cake, I couldn’t ask for anything more than that.”

Joining Dean and Matheson on this month’s First Monday Crime panel were two other first-time storytellers: Briton Tim Glister, and Femi Kayode, an exciting new name in Nigerian noir.

Glister’s novel, Red Corona (Point Blank UK), is a Cold War-era espionage thriller. These days he’s an advertising executive, but to make himself think like a writer, Glister drew on his previous participation in the publishing industry. “I worked [as a bookseller] in [the UK bookstore chain] Waterstones and I was a literary agent, briefly,” he recalled. “What that taught me was what readers want, [and] what shoppers want. … I had quite a good practical side of reading [my novel] as an author and a writer, and then thinking of it in a slightly more editorial way … with the mindset that you need to absolutely adore [what you’ve written], but so do other people.”

Kayode trained as a clinical psychologist, a profession shared by the protagonist in his atmospheric mystery, Lightseekers (Mulholland [U.S.], Raven [UK]). That new novel’s story is based on a horrific true-life incidence of mob violence in Nigeria back in 2012, during which residents of a provincial village murdered a group of students by hanging burning tires around their necks. “From the very first time I heard about the original crime …,” Kayode told listeners, “I thought about it as a novel. I always wanted to explore why. Why would people do this?” Kayode was finally able to pen his book in England, while he was studying creative writing at the University of East Anglia.

Watchers were led to believe, over the course of this First Monday discussion, that these four nascent novelists can look forward to promising futures. Dean’s Girl A is already slated to become a limited TV series in the States, directed and executive produced by Johan Renck, the Swedish, Emmy Award-winning director of 2019’s Chernobyl. Kayode and Matheson both confirmed during the session that their representatives had sold the screen rights to their novels as well, though they supplied no details.

Meanwhile, Glister joked that the name of his book, Red Corona—with its unintended pandemic allusions—might be putting off TV executives from bidding on its adaptation. In reality, of course, the corona of Glister’s title has nothing to do with the deadly coronavirus that has killed so many people worldwide over the last year; instead, it refers to a fictitious surveillance satellite project. “A year and a half ago [when I wrote the book],” he said, with a sigh, “[corona] was my new exciting word which no one knew. And then things changed.”

First Monday Crime, a monthly discussion series founded in April 2016 and originally held in London before a live audience, has been broadcast via Facebook ever since Great Britain went into pandemic lockdown early last year. It’s scheduled to return on April 12. That’s actually the second Monday of next month, as this year April 5 will be a public holiday—Easter Monday—in the UK.

Daggers Flying Everywhere

There’s been lots of news coming out today from the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, being held in Harrogate, England.

To begin, we can now broadcast the first five winners of Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) Dagger Awards for 2011. They are as follows:

CWA International Dagger: Three Seconds, by Anders Roslund and Börge Hellström, translated by Kari Dickson (Quercus)

Also nominated: The Wings of the Sphinx, by Andrea Camilleri, translated by Stephen Sartarelli (Mantle); Needle in a Haystack, by Ernesto Mallo, translated by Jethro Soutar (Bitter Lemon Press); The Saint-Florentin Murders, by Jean-François Parot, translated by Howard Curtis (Gallic); River of Shadows, by Valerio Varesi, translated by Joseph Farrell (MacLehose); An Uncertain Place, by Fred Vargas, translated by Siân Reynolds (Harvill Secker); and Death on a Galician Shore, by Domingo Villar, translated by Sonia Soto (Abacus)

(Editor’s note: Astute readers of Karen Meek’s Euro Crime blog had predicted a different result in this category, betting on Vargas’ An Uncertain Place, instead.)

CWA Gold Dagger for Non-fiction: The Killer of Little Shepherds, by Douglas Starr (Simon & Schuster)

Also nominated: The Invention of Murder, by Judith Flanders (HarperCollins); Slaughter on a Snowy Morn, by Colin Evans (Icon Books); In the Place of Justice, by Wilbert Rideau (Profile); The Murder Room, by Michael Capuzzo (Michael Joseph); and Mr. Briggs’ Hat, by Kate Colquhoun (Little, Brown)

CWA Short Story Dagger: “Homework,” by Phil Lovesey (from The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime, Vol. 8, edited by Maxim Jakubowski; Constable & Robinson)

Also nominated: “Wednesday’s Child,” by Ken Bruen (from First Thrills, edited by Lee Child; Forge); “The Princess of Felony Flats,” by Bill Cameron (from First Thrills); “East of Suez, West of Charing Cross Road,” by John Lawton (from Agents of Treachery, edited by Otto Penzler; Vintage); and “The Dead Club,” by Michael Palmer and Daniel Palmer (from First Thrills)

CWA Debut Dagger (for not-yet-published works): What Hidden Lies, by Michele Rowe (South Africa)

Also nominated: A Burial Place for Strangers, by Sharon Hunt (Canada); A Quiet Night in Entebbe, by Peter Wynn Norris (UK); A Vicious Indulgence, by Annie Hauxwell (Australia); Biographies of a Victim, by Gunnar Lange-Nielsen (Norway); The Boy Who Loved Penguins, by S.W.C. Webb (UK); The Greengrocers and Fruiterers’ Convention, by Martin Ungless (UK); Hide and Seek, by Sarah Darby (UK); Men of the Rose, by Jessica Ramage (UK); The Outrageous Behaviour of Left-Handed Dwarves, by Graham Brack (UK); The Temp, by Luke Melia (UK); and Unveiled Threats, by Stephanie Light (UK)

CWA Dagger in the Library: Mo Hayder

Also nominated: S.J. Bolton (Bantam Press); William Brodrick (Little, Brown); R.J. Ellory (Orion); Jason Goodwin (Faber and Faber); Elly Griffths (Quercus); Sophie Hannah (Hodder & Stoughton); John Harvey (William Heinemann); Susan Hill (Vintage); Graham Hurley (Orion); Peter James (Macmillan); Philip Kerr (Quercus); Phil Rickman (Quercus/Corvus); C.J. Sansom (Macmillan); Andrew Taylor (Penguin); and L.C. Tyler (Macmillan)

* * *

In addition, an announcement was made today of “three key book longlists and one shortlist for the [2011] Specsavers Crime Thriller Awards on ITV3, celebrating the very best of British and International crime thriller fiction.” Here are those contenders.

CWA Gold Dagger:

• Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter, by Tom Franklin (Pan)

• Hanging Hill, by Mo Hayder (Bantam Press)

• Snowdrops, by A.D. Miller (Atlantic Books)

• The Cypress House, by Michael Koryta (Hodder & Stoughton)

• The End of the Wasp Season, by Denise Mina (Orion)

• The Lock Artist, by Steve Hamilton (Orion)

• The Villa Triste, by Lucretia Grindle (Pan)

• White Heat, by M.J McGrath (Mantle)

CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger:

• An Agent of Deceit, by Chris Morgan Jones (Mantle)

• Before I Go to Sleep, by S.J. Watson (Doubleday)

• Cold Rain, by Craig Smith (Myrmidon)

• Savages, by Don Winslow (Heinemann)

• The Cobra, by Frederick Forsyth (Corgi)

• The Good Son, by Michael Gruber (Corvus)

• The Lock Artist, by Steve Hamilton (Orion)

• The Trinity Six, by Charles Cumming (HarperCollins)

CWA John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger:

• Before I Go to Sleep, by S.J. Watson (Doubleday)

• Into the Darkest Corner, by Elizabeth Haynes (Myriad)

• Kiss Me Quick, by Danny Miller (Robinson)

• Or the Bull Kills You, by Jason Webster (Chatto & Windus)

• Sister, by Rosamund Lupton (Piatkus)

• The Dead Woman of Juárez, by Sam Hawken (Serpent’s Tail)

• The Dogs of Rome, by Conor Fitzgerald (Bloomsbury)

• The Poison Tree, by Erin Kelly (Hodder)

ITV3 People’s Bestseller Dagger:

• The Sixth Man, by David Baldacci (Macmillan)

• Worth Dying For, by Lee Child (Bantam)

• Good As Dead, by Mark Billingham (Little, Brown)

• Dead Man’s Grip, by Peter James (Macmillan)

• Before the Poison, by Peter Robinson (Hodder)

Shortlists for the first three categories will be released in mid-August.

Meanwhile, the British public is being invited to cast ballots for the ITV3 People’s Bestseller Dagger. Voting begins tomorrow, July 23. Click here for more information.

Interesting Job You Guys Have

I’ve come to know many literary agents over the years, and have even been represented by one--London’s Curtis Brown--back in the 1980s. These agents are often very informative when it comes to tracking new developments in the genre that comprises crime fiction and thrillers. And one of the biggest names in that field is Jane Gregory, owner of the UK’s Gregory and Company.

For those who don’t move in this circle, Gregory is not only a literary agent but a pillar of London’s publishing community, and a huge crime-fiction enthusiast. She and her team handle sales to publishers in Britain and the United States, as well as to film and television producers. Before setting up as an agent, Gregory was a rights and contracts director for publishers. She’s a co-founder of the UK’s Orange Prize for Fiction, sits on the programming committee of the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival, and co-founded the career support group Women in Publishing.

I have known Jane Gregory for many years now, and have found her to be a larger-than-life personality--warm, generous, and very, very funny. So I was flattered to find myself invited (along with Shots editor Mike Stotter) to last week’s 20th anniversary celebration of Gregory and Company, held at London’s Fulham Palace.

The invitation said that the dress code for this affair was “Drop-Dead Gorgeous,” and that there would be a band and dancing late into the night, fueled with champagne and canapés. So, mischievously, Stotter and I decided to make a special effort for this literary soirée. We wigs, false mustaches, and matching sideburns to go with our sunglasses, black ties, white shirts, and black suits. The idea was to arrive first as the Men in Black (that’s us in the photo above) and, after tipping back a few to get our courage up, donning wigs and other pieces of hair to transform ourselves into the Pulp Fiction duo.

While preparing for this event, I wondered which of Jane Gregory’s notable clients would show up. Maybe even the controversial Tony Blair? Or perhaps his successor in the Prime Minister’s office, Gordon Brown, who--little-known fact--is a big crime-fiction enthusiast. (Brown appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Open Book last Sunday to talk about his passion for the genre. That program is archived here.)

Sadly, neither of those gentlemen was in attendance. But as the cab dropped us off at the Fulham Palace gate, we were greeted by Julia Wisdom from HarperCollins UK and the award-winning novelist Val McDermid (Beneath the Bleeding), who were leaving early, since McDermid had to be off to the Continent for a literary festival. And no sooner did we say our good-byes and enter the palace, than we were handed flutes of chilled champagne and directed to a giant marquee, where we just caught the end of Gregory’s speech welcoming everyone and explaining that this fête was her way of thanking us all for supporting Gregory and Company over the last couple of decades. A huge round of applause erupted and we raised our glasses in celebration.

There must have been 200 to 300 guests at this party, a Who’s Who’s of British publishing notables, together with some international names. I had a chance to chat with the managers of next month’s Harrogate Crime Writing Festival, as well as Natasha Cooper (A Greater Evil), this year’s events organizer. I was amazed to hear that at this stage, there have already been more tickets than ever before sold for the festival, which means it will be a crowded but exciting event.

A bit later, I fell into conversation with Chris Simms, whose work I’ve followed ever since the 2004 publication of Outside the White Lines, his debut novel about a serial killer who stalks his victims on the motorways veining Great Britain. Simms was there with a representative from his German publisher, the pair discussing the recent promotion of Simms to a spot on the list of Waterstone’s top 25 new talents (a rundown that also includes both Nick Stone and Richard Morgan). This subject apparently makes the Manchester author blush, but only makes me more excited to see his next novel, Savage Moon, which is due out in the UK this fall.

Roaming the crowd, I saw some of Gregory’s more established authors, including Mo Hayder (Pig Island), who wound up at one point dancing with her agent (see the photograph above, with Gregory on the left), as well as such up-and-coming talents as Dreda Say Mitchell, a John Creasey Memorial Dagger winner, and Caro Ramsey, whose debut novel, Absolution, has been enjoying terrific press notices. One interesting thing about crime fictionists such as Simms, Hayder, Mitchell, and Ramsay, is that while their stories might be dark and menacing, they’re actually the most genial people you’re likely ever to meet. They just kill and maim in their imaginations.

Also putting in a showing here were Zöe Sharp and her husband, Andy Butler, who were preparing for a trip to the States, during which Sharp will be promoting her latest offering, Second Shot, and attending ThrillerFest in New York City.

By the end of the evening, Stotter and I were exhausted. So, after thanking the Jane Gregory team for their hospitality, he and I headed off in our Pulp Fiction getups, bound for our hotel and nursing the beginnings of world-class hangovers. I remember muttering, “We’re getting too old for this shit ...” in my best impression of Samuel L. Jackson. Stotter, though, was incoherent by this stage, and could only express his agreement with a single but loud belch.

Valuing Track Records

The British Crime Writers’ Association has announced its longlist of nominees for the 2012 Dagger in the Library Award.

“Unlike most other literary prizes,” the CWA explains on its Web site, “the Dagger in the Library is awarded not for an individual book but for the author’s body of work. ... The nominated authors must be alive, preferably working in Britain, and cannot have won the award before. As the award is for a body of work, authors should have published at least three books.”

Last year’s winner was Mo Hayder. This time around there are 15 authors vying to capture the CWA prize. They are:

• Simon Beckett
• Belinda Bauer
• S.J. Bolton
• Gordon Ferris
• Frances Brody
• Elena Forbes
• Nicci French
• Elly Griffiths
• John Harvey
• Susan Hill
• Shona MacLean
• Peter May
• Steve Mosby
• Imogen Robertson
• M.J. Trow

A shortlist of contenders is to be released in May, with the winner to rewarded at a ceremony this coming summer.

Congratulations to all of the nominees.

45 Reasons to Go on Living

Yeah, yeah, I know: 2009 has almost a month yet to go, and if you’re like me, you’re still reading books that were published earlier this year. At a time when folks are contemplating which novels in print they can wrap up and hand out for the holidays, is it really appropriate to begin talking about works of crime-fiction that won’t be available in stores for weeks, or even months? Well, of course it is. Since when did the fact that your to-be-read pile is already high enough to justify attaching aircraft warning beacons stop you from coveting books not yet in print?

Just to whet your appetite for what’s coming down the pike in 2010, I trolled today through several sites that compile lists of soon-to-be-published crime, mystery, and thriller fiction. For new U.S. releases, I turned primarily to Ashley McConnell’s The Bloodstained Bookshelf and the new hardcover releases page at Stop, You’re Killing Me! It seems that, among the treats we can all look forward to in the near future are the American version of Martin Edwards’ Dancing for the Hangman (December); Jonathan Gash’s new Lovejoy novel, Faces in the Pool (December); Alone, by Loren D. Estleman (December); I, Sniper, by Stephen Hunter (December); Paganini’s Ghost, by Paul Adam (January); The Godfather of Kathmandu, by John Burdett (January); Skin, by Mo Hayder (January); The First Rule, by Robert Crais (January); The Lock Artist, by Steve Hamilton (January); Gone ’til November, by Wallace Stroby (January); Requiem in Vienna, by J. Sydney Jones (January); Stuart M. Kaminsky’s last Porfiry Rostnikov novel, A Whisper to the Living (January); City of Dragons, by Kelli Stanley (February); Print the Legend, by Craig McDonald (February); A Night Too Dark, by Dana Stabenow (February); Let It Ride, by John McFetridge (February); The Fourth Assassin, by Matt Beynon Rees (February); Do They Know I’m Running? by David Corbett (March); Blood Hina, by Naomi Hirahara (March); The Weed that Strings the Hangman’s Bag, by Alan Bradley (March); The Spellmans Strike Again, by Lisa Lutz (March); Martin Cruz Smith’s new Arkady Renko novel, The Golden Mile (March); The Bad Kitty Lounge, by Michael Wiley (March); The Black Cat, by Martha Grimes (April); Eight for Eternity, by Mary Reed and Eric Mayer (April); and A River in the Sky, by Elizabeth Peters (March).

In search of forthcoming British titles of note, I surfed over to the Future Releases section of Karen Meek’s Euro Crime site, and then picked up a few more ideas from the Web pages of London’s Goldsboro Books. They turned me on to A Murder on London Bridge, by Susanna Gregory (December); Bad Penny Blues, by Cathi Unsworth (December); A Question of Motive, by Roderic Jeffries (December); The Last 10 Seconds, by Simon Kernick (January); Loss, by Tony Black (January); The Man from Beijing, by Henning Mankell (January); Deadly Communion, by Frank Tallis (January); Death by Design, by Barbara Nadel (January); Blue Lightning, by Ann Cleeves (February); Deathwatch, by Jim Kelly (February); The Detective Branch, by Andrew Pepper (February); The Snowman, by Jo Nesbø (March); 61 Hours, by Lee Child (March); A Room Swept White, by Sophie Hannah (March); Stephen Booth’s seventh Ben Cooper/Diane Fry mystery, Lost River (April); Free Country, by Jeremy Duns (April); The Bulgarian Claimant, by Jason Goodwin (April); The City of Lost Girls, by Declan Hughes (April); and R.N. Morris’ third Porfiry Petrovich investigation, A Razor Wrapped in Silk (April).

Whew! I haven’t even seen most of these novels, much less been able to crack their spines, and I’m already feeling overwhelmed by the prospect of having to read them.

Worth the Waites

Well, I roared laughing when I saw the press release below, sent to me by publisher Little, Brown UK. Because I’m a longtime fan of author Martyn Waites’ work, I have just moved my copy of 2009’s The Surrogate--credited to “Tania Carver”--up in my to-be-read pile.

Tania Carver, the author of The Surrogate, has been revealed as the pseudonym for Martyn Waites, the award-winning author of the Joe Donovan crime series set in Newcastle, and his wife, Linda Waites.

Powerful, pacy and provocative, The Surrogate introduced DI Phillip Brennan and psychologist Marina Esposito in the first of this unflinching and compulsively readable series. It was in the paperback fiction top-50 for four weeks, and was a Sunday Times top-20 bestseller. It outsold the four-week debut sales of Tess Gerritsen, Mo Hayder and Karin Slaughter, and was a massive bestseller in Germany, published by Ullstein, where it reached the Spiegel bestseller list--a very rare achievement for a debut novel. It has also been translated into several other languages. The second novel in the series, The Creeper, is due to be published this September.

Martyn Waites said:
‘When David Shelley heard that I was writing a thriller that would be the British equivalent of Karin Slaughter or Tess Gerritson, I don’t think he believed it was something I could do. But he challenged me to go ahead and do it. And he was right. I couldn’t do it. Not on my own. My wife, Linda, has always worked closely with me on my novels--in fact the original idea for The Surrogate was hers--and I found myself increasingly calling on her for help as I was writing it. Eventually her input was so great she became co-writer. We’re very proud of The Surrogate and thrilled at what Little, Brown and [literary agent] Jane Gregory have achieved in making it an international bestseller. And it’s wonderful to be working with David Shelley again, who is undoubtedly one of the best editors in publishing today. Roll on The Creeper!’

David Shelley, Deputy Publisher at Little, Brown
Book Group said:
‘I have always been a huge fan of Martyn’s work. The Surrogate is one of the very best debut thrillers I’ve ever worked on--I think partly due to the special chemistry between Martyn and Linda, which makes it a book with utterly believable (and often terrifying) male and female characters. It’s an amazing book and its genesis makes it even more intriguing to me. I’m thrilled that it is on the Theakston’s shortlist.’

That’s right: The Surrogate has been shortlisted for the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year award. The winner will be announced on July 22 during a ceremony during the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival.

When I sit down to have a drink with the authors afterward, should I address them as Martyn and Linda, or as Tania?

Make Your Preferences Known

“For the first time ever,” reports Shotsmag Confidential, “readers will decide the longlist for the [Crime Writers’ Association] Dagger in the Library Award as its sponsor Dead Good and the CWA relaunch the Award for 2014.” This commendation, one of six “highly prized” annual Dagger Awards, is given “not for an individual book but for an author’s body of work.” Previous recipients include Belinda Bauer, Steve Mosby, Mo Hayder, Colin Cotterill, Stuart MacBride, and Alexander McCall Smith.

The public nominating process for this year’s prize commenced last week and will continue until September 1. The 10 authors accumulating the greatest number of votes during that period will move on to the judging process. A panel that includes previous winners, CWA representatives, and UK librarians will select the winner.

Click here to find a page where you can vote for three of your favorite crime, mystery, or thriller authors. UK residents who cast ballots will also be entered in a drawing to win £200 worth of books.

Only the Barry Best

’Tis the season for crime-fiction award nominations. The Hammett Prize, the Arthur Ellis Awards, the Last Laugh Award, the Ned Kelly Awards, the Duncan Lawrie Dagger Awards, and now comes the list of contenders for this year’s Barry Awards, given out by Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine. The envelopes, please ...

Best Novel (published in the U.S. in 2007):
• Soul Patch, by Reed Farrel Coleman (Bleak House)
• The Unquiet, by John Connolly (Atria)
• Down River, by John Hart (St Martin’s Minotaur)
• Dirty Martini, by J.A. Konrath (Hyperion)
• What the Dead Know, by Laura Lippman (Morrow)
• Red Cat, by Peter Spiegelman (Knopf)

Best First Novel (published in the U.S. in 2007):
• Missing Witness, by Gordon Campbell (Morrow)
• Big City, Bad Blood, by Sean Chercover (Morrow)
• In the Woods, by Tana French (Viking)
• The Spellman Files, by Lisa Lutz (Simon & Schuster)
• The Collaborator of Bethlehem, by Matt Beynon Rees (Soho Press)
• The Blade Itself, by Marcus Sakey (St. Martin’s Minotaur)

Best British Crime Novel (published in the U.K. in 2007, not necessarily written by a British writer nor set in the U.K.):
• A Quiet Belief in Angels, by R.J. Ellory (Orion)
• Pig Island, by Mo Hayder (Bantam Press)
• One Under, by Graham Hurley (Orion)
• The Death List, by Paul Johnston (Mira)
• The 50/50 Killer, by Steve Mosby (Orion)
• Damnation Falls, by Edward Wright (Orion)

Best Paperback Original:
• Queenpin, by Megan Abbott (Simon & Schuster)
• Black Widow Agency, by Felicia Donovan (Midnight Ink)
• Choke Point, by Jay MacLarty (Pocket)
• The Mark, by Jason Pinter (Mira)
• Wash This Blood Clean from My Hand, by Fred Vargas (Penguin)
• Who Is Conrad Hirst?, by Kevin Wignall (Simon & Schuster)

Best Thriller:
• No Time for Goodbye, by Linwood Barclay (Bantam)
• The Cleaner, by Brett Battles (Delacorte)
• The Watchman, by Robert Crais (Simon & Schuster)
• Volk’s Game, by Brent Ghelfi (Henry Holt)
• Silence, by Thomas Perry (Harcourt)
• Midnight Rambler, by Jim Swain (Ballantine)

The winners will be announced during Bouchercon in Baltimore, to be held from October 9 to 12.

I Have Seen the Future ... and It’s a Gigantic, Teetering To-Be-Read Pile

Spring tends to be a difficult period for me, reading-wise. I’m gladly making my way through the many books I received for my birthday (in March), but that were actually released somewhat earlier in the year. And I’ll need to focus next on the deluge of new crime fiction due out in June and July, just in time to pack along on lazy summer trips.

Novels brought out during this interlude between rainy, overcast days and when the air starts to take on the fragrance of suntan lotion again, and deck chairs finally reappear, may not win the same regard as those scheduled for release in anticipation of vacations. Which is quite unfair, because there will be plenty of intriguing crime, mystery, and thriller works making their way to store shelves over the next two months, on both sides of the Atlantic. I won’t have enough free hours to enjoy all of those listed below, but they certainly deserve recognition.

APRIL (U.S.):

• Michael Connelly, The Fifth Witness (Little, Brown)

• Douglas Corleone, Night on Fire (Minotaur)

• Janet Dawson, Bit Player (Perseverance Press)

• P.C. Doherty, Nightshade (Minotaur)

• David Downing, Potsdam Station (Soho Press)

• Terence Faherty, Dance in the Dark (Five Star)

• Heywood Gould, The Serial Killer’s Daughter (Nightbird Publishing)

• Rosemary Harris, Slugfest (Minotaur)

• Tony Hays, The Beloved Dead (Forge)

• Philip Kerr, Field Gray (Putnam)

• Camilla Lackberg, The Preacher (Pegasus)

• Jassy Mackenzie, Stolen Lives (Soho Press)

• Jean-Patrick Manchette, Fatale (NYRB Classics)

• Bill Moody, Fade to Blue (Poisoned Pen Press)

• Anne Perry, Treason at Lisson Grove (Ballantine)

• Lori Roy, Bent Road (Dutton)

• John Shannon, A Little Too Much (Severn House)

• Julia Spencer-Fleming, One Was a Soldier (Minotaur)

• Norb Vonnegut, The Gods of Greenwich (Minotaur)

• Daniel Woodrell, The Bayou Trilogy (Mulholland)

APRIL (UK):

• Stephen Booth, The Devil’s Edge (Sphere)

• Lee Jackson, The Diary of a Murder (Snowbooks)

• Mo Hayder, Hanging Hill (Bantam Press)

• Tobias Jones, White Death (Faber and Faber)

• Peter Lovesey, Stagestruck (Sphere)

• Edward Marston, Blood on the Line (Allison & Busby)

• Steve Mosby, Black Flowers (Orion)

• Andrew Pepper, Bloody Winter (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)

• Anne Perry, Acceptable Loss (Headline)

• Imogen Robertson, Island of Bones (Headline Review)

• Zoë Sharp, Fifth Victim (Allison & Busby)

• Kerry Tombs, The Tewkesbury Tomb (Robert Hale)

• Fred Vargas, An Uncertain Place (Harvill Secker)

• S.J. Watson, Before I Go to Sleep (Doubleday)

MAY (U.S.):

• Lawrence Block, A Drop of the Hard Stuff (Mulholland)

• Gyles Brandreth, Oscar Wilde and the Vampire Murders (Touchstone)

• Vicki Delany, Among the Departed (Poisoned Pen Press)

• Aaron Elkins, The Worst Thing (Berkley)

• Chris Knopf, Black Swan (Permanent Press)

• Jo Nesbø, The Snowman (Knopf)

• Clare O’Donohue, Missing Persons (Plume)

• Robert B. Parker, Sixkill (Putnam)

• Thomas Perry, The Informant (Otto Penzler/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

• Stefanie Pintoff, Secret of the White Rose (Minotaur)

• Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins, Kiss Her Goodbye (Otto Penzler/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

MAY (UK):

• Rory Clements, Prince (John Murray)

• Eoin Colfer, Plugged (Headline)

• James Craig, London Calling (Robinson)

• Jeffery Deaver, Carte Blanche (Hodder & Stoughton)

• Chris Morgan Jones, An Agent of Deceit (Mantle)

• Mari Jungstedt, The Dead of Summer (Doubleday)

• Lars Kepler, The Hypnotist (Blue Door)

• James McCreet, The Thieves’ Labyrinth (Macmillan)

• Brian McGilloway, Little Girl Lost (Macmillan)

• Denise Mina, The End of the Wasp Season (Orion)

• Aly Monroe, Blacklight (John Murray)
• R.N. Morris, The Cleansing Flames (Faber and Faber)

• Matt Benyon Rees, Mozart’s Last Aria (Corvus)

• Leigh Russell, Dead End (No Exit Press)

• Nick Stone, Voodoo Eyes (Sphere)

Would anyone else like to chime in with their own crime-fiction reading recommendations for these two months before summer hits? There’s a Comments tab below. You know how to use it.

Top Billingham

Euro Crime reports that Mark Billingham has won the 2009 Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award for Death Message (Little, Brown, 2007), the seventh installment of his series featuring Detective Inspector Tom Thorne. This announcement came during the Harrogate Crime Writing Festival, which is being held today through Sunday in Harrogate, England.

Death Message was one of 14 books shortlisted for the Old Peculier prize. The other nominees were: The Accident Man, by Tom Cain (Bantam Press); Bad Luck and Trouble, by Lee Child (Bantam Press); Gone to Ground, by John Harvey (Heinemann); Ritual, by Mo Hayder (Bantam Press); The Garden of Evil, by David Hewson (Macmillan); A Cure for All Diseases, by Reginald Hill (HarperCollins); The Colour of Blood, by Declan Hughes (John Murray); Dead Man’s Footsteps, by Peter James (Macmillan); Broken Skin, by Stuart MacBride (HarperCollins); Beneath the Bleeding, by Val McDermid (HarperCollins); Exit Music, by Ian Rankin (Orion); Friend of the Devil, by Peter Robinson (Hodder & Stoughton); and Savage Moon, by Chris Simms (Orion).

Death Message has already been released in paperback in the UK. But it isn't due for its hardcover release in the States until October. Harper will be the publisher.

Bullet Points: Casting a Wide ’Net Edition

• London’s Goldsboro Books today brings us its roll of half a dozen nominees for the 2021 Goldsboro Books Glass Bell Award, a prize “awarded annually to a compelling novel, of any genre—from romance and thrillers, to historical, speculative and literary fiction—with brilliant characterisation and a distinct voice that is confidently written and assuredly realized.” Four of this year’s contenders are debut novels, and three of them are quite easily classified as works of crime and mystery fiction. Here are the nominees:

— The Girl with the Louding Voice, by Abi Daré (Sceptre)
— The Court of Miracles, by Kester Grant (HarperVoyager)
— Apeirogon, by Colum McCann (Bloomsbury)
— Eight Detectives, by Alex Pavesi (Michael Joseph)
— The Devil and the Dark Water, by Stuart Turton (‎Raven)
— People of Abandoned Character, by Clare Whitfield (Head of Zeus)

A Goldsboro Books press release explains, “The winner, who will be announced on Thursday 30th September, wins £2,000 and a beautiful, handmade glass bell.” The longlist of candidates for this year’s Glass Bell Award was circulated in June.

• Hard Case Crime’s announcement that it is readying “the final unpublished novel” by Donald E. Westlake, Call Me a Cab, for release in February 2022 sent Fred Fitch of The Westlake Review in search of that story’s background. As he suggests here, Call Me a Cab may be an expanded version of a novella of that same title, which Westlake placed in the June 1979 issue of Redbook magazine … or else the manuscript could have been developed from “a film treatment/script that never became a film.” As to the book’s plot, here’s Hard Case’s synopsis:

In 1977, one of the world’s finest crime novelists turned his pen to suspense of a very different sort—and the results have never been published, until now.

Fans of mystery fiction have often pondered whether it would be possible to write a suspense novel without any crime at all, and in Call Me a Cab the masterful Donald E. Westlake answered the question in his inimitable style. You won’t find any crime in these pages—but what you will find is a wonderful suspense story, about a New York City taxi driver hired to drive a beautiful woman all the way across America, from Manhattan to Los Angeles, where the biggest decision of her life is waiting to be made. It’s Westlake at his witty, thought-provoking best, and it proves that a page-turner doesn’t need to have a bomb set to go off at the end of it in order to keep sparks flying every step of the way.

• Happy 10th birthday to the blog Crime Fiction Lover!

• The Rap Sheet noted the recent passing of author Mo Hayder here. Subsequently have come fine tributes from Shots as well as from her fellow fictionist Mark Billingham, writing in The Guardian.

• Sisters in Crime Australia has let it be known that many of its events, previously set to be conducted in person, are now moving online, thanks to dangers presented by COVID-19’s hyper-transmissible delta variant. Those changes affect the 2021 Davitt Awards, which had been scheduled for presentation during a dinner in Melbourne on Saturday, August 28. A press release says, “The award ceremony will [now] be available for free world-wide viewing on Saturday 28 August from 8 p.m. AEST on Sisters in Crime’s YouTube channel or Watch Party on Facebook, where you can join other crime fans for an interactive experience (and maybe even frock up or suit up).” Check Sisters in Crime Australia’s Facebook page for further details to come.

• Among the subjects remarked upon in Mike Ripley’s latest “Getting Away with Murder” column for Shots: Antarctica-set mysteries and thrillers; Maurizio de Giovanni’s Bread for the Bastards of Pizzofalcone; a 50th-anniversary edition of Goshawk Squadron, “the famous WWI Royal Flying Corps novel by veteran thriller writer Derek Robinson”; and fresh offerings from Anita Sivakumaran, Laura Marshall, Christian Unge, S.D. Sykes, and other writers.

• The Strand Magazine’s new issue (#63) contains “Advice to a Secretary,” a humorous “lost work” by Raymond Chandler. “Published here for the first time,” reads a description of the issue, “the article covers everything from his contempt for grammarians to his discomfort with the employer-employee relationship. It also makes clear that, like his most famous protagonist, Chandler’s sympathies lay with those less powerful. Raymond Chandler scholar Professor Sarah Trott pens an introduction providing not only context but also an in-depth analysis of Raymond Chandler’s unpublished article.” This is evidently the third time The Strand has featured a previously unreleased Chandler piece: “It’s All Right—He Only Died” appeared in 2017, while “Advice to an Employer” finally saw print in 2020.

• What’s not to like about an Eva Lynd calendar?

• I’m not as fond of Grantchester, now that James Norton is no longer leading the cast of that British historical TV whodunit series. But I did—with some hesitation—make the transition to Tom Brittney playing Norton’s replacement, and stuck with the show through its very uneven Season 5, in large part because I still enjoy watching Robson Green in the role of Geordie Keating. It’s likely, too, that I shall tune in for Season 6, which begins showing under PBS-TV’s Masterpiece umbrella on Sunday, October 3. Series creator Daisy Coulam promises those upcoming eight episodes are “going to be kind of game-changing for a lot of our characters—we’re going to put them all through the wringer this series. And it’s a big series for [gay Anglican curate] Leonard [Fitch], where we’re going to take him to some quite dark places. Basically, we’re going to do a couple of quite big stories for our central characters that pull everyone into them. So it’s not separate strands—each strand will affect all of our lovely characters. It’s going to be emotional for all of them! I’m quite excited, actually, about the series. I feel like it could be the height of Grantchester.”



• Speaking of Grantchester, word is that Season 7 of that ITV-TV-originating show has already begun filming in earnest. “This series is set in the long hot summer of 1959,” explains the network’s Web site, “and wedding season is in full swing in the Cambridgeshire village of Grantchester. As the Reverend Will Davenport [Brittney] unites happy couples in holy matrimony, Detective Inspector Geordie Keating is busy as ever investigating a range of local murder cases. With a new decade just around the corner, the question of what the future holds is on everyone’s minds, not least Will’s, but before the ’50s roll over into the swinging sixties there are some crimes to solve and some life-changing decisions to be made that might change life in Grantchester forever.” Expect Season 7 to premiere sometime in 2022.

• On the recent occasion of what would have been Raymond Chandler’s 133rd birthday (July 23), Literary Hub revisited that wordsmith’s “most iconic lines.” One must admit, it’s damnably hard to beat such gems as “It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in” (from The Big Sleep), “The girl gave him a look which ought to have stuck at least four inches out of his back” (The Long Goodbye), and “I’m not a young man. I’m old, tired and full of no coffee” (Playback).

• Here’s something I don’t remember hearing before. In a brief look back at “Enough Rope,” the July 31, 1960, episode of NBC-TV’s The Chevy Mystery Show that may have first brought the character of Lieutenant Columbo to the small screen—in this case played by character actor Bert Freed—Mystery*Scene contributor David Vineyard notes that “it was originally written as a vehicle for Bing Crosby.” That’s true only in part. As I understand it, in the late 1960s, when screenwriters Richard Levinson and William Link set out to sell Universal Studios on the idea of a TV series starring Columbo, they approached aging crooner Crosby to play the part of their deceptively brilliant Los Angeles police detective, but Crosby turned them down, supposedly because he wanted to do less work and play more golf. Anyway, I knew all of that. What Vineyard writes next is the new part—that Crosby was eyed as an ideal Columbo based on his turn as a “laid-back private detective in Top o’ the Morning.” That 1949 Paramount comedy found Crosby cast as Joe Mulqueen, “a singing insurance investigator who comes to Ireland to recover the stolen Blarney Stone—and romance the local policeman’s daughter” (to quote from Wikipedia). Hmm, I don’t know. Watching the original trailer for that picture, it’s hard to imagine Levinson and Link could have seen any relationship between Mulqueen and Columbo.

• There’s more about Columbo’s roots here.

• Also in Mystery*File, look for Francis M. Nevins’ excellent retrospective on F. Van Wyck Mason (1897-1978), a once-prolific, Boston-born author and historian. Nevins observes that “he was probably best known for a string of gargantuan historical adventure novels, beginning with Three Harbours (1938), Stars on the Sea (1940) and Rivers of Glory (1942),” but also penned myriad mysteries starring Captain Hugh North, “an officer in Army Intelligence but never seen in uniform and obviously intended as an American Sherlock Holmes.” The North novels run from Seeds of Murder (1930) and The Vesper Service Murders (1931) to The Sulu Sea Murders (1933), Two Tickets for Tangier (1955), and Secret Mission to Bangkok (1960). “In later novels,” Nevins concludes, “Captain Hugh tackled various problems of international intrigue in exotic locales and did so well that he was promoted to Major and then to Colonel, nimbly leapfrogging over the intervening rank of Lieutenant Colonel. These books converted him from a Holmes-like figure to something of a prototype for James Bond and perhaps for James Atlee Phillips’ American secret agent Joe Gall.” I’m not sure I have ever tackled any of Mason’s fiction. Perhaps it’s time for the two of us to get acquainted.

• The book-industry e-newsletter Shelf Awareness reports that “Kensington Publishing is launching Kensington Cozies, an imprint dedicated to the cozy mystery genre, which usually have ‘little-to-no violence, profanity, or sex; likeable amateur sleuths; tight-knit communities; and series arcs that allow the protagonists to grow in their professions and relationships.’ The first titles go on sale December 28. Over time, backlist titles that fit the cozy criteria will be folded into the imprint. Historical mysteries will remain under the Kensington Books imprint.” (Hat tip to B.V. Lawson.)

• TV streamer Netflix has greenlighted the series The Night Agent. Inspired by Matthew Quirk’s 2019 New York Times bestseller, “The Night Agent,” says Deadline, “is a sophisticated, character-based, action-thriller centering on a low-level FBI agent who works in the basement of the White House, manning a phone that never rings—until the night that it does, propelling him into a fast-moving and dangerous conspiracy that ultimately leads all the way to the Oval Office.”

• Shotsmag Confidential directs me to this YouTube video, which finds “Barry Forshaw in conversation with Laura Wilson, Maxim Jakubowski, Ayo Onatade, Paul Burke and Victoria Selman, debating their best crime fiction picks of the last decade, along with the changing landscape of crime fiction over that time.” Books mentioned in that video are catalogued on the Crime Time site.

• And was 1975 really “the greatest year in the history of crime fiction”? Yes, according to short-story writer Kevin Mims, who defends his position in Something Is Going to Happen, the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine blog. In a follow-up post, Mims contends—seemingly against logic—that Quentin Tarantino’s June release, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), a novelization of his 2019 film of that same name, was “the last great novel of 1975.”

Bullet Points: The Post-Holiday Edition

Some people are better than others at finding creative ways to spend a long weekend. For my part, I exhausted the last four days just reading and trying finally to catch up on work I’d had to put off while completing my latest book project. It never ceases to amaze me, that every task always takes longer than I would have predicted. Does one have to end life still clutching a to-do list? Probably, since today’s world provides so many distractions.

• Among the more welcome diversions for me this weekend was the June/July issue of Mystery News. The front-page interview is with UK journalist-turned-novelist Jim Kelly, who writes the Philip Dryden series (The Water Clock, The Skeleton Man). Inside, there’s a lengthy look at Michael G. Jacob and Daniela de Gregorio, who under the pseudonym “Michael Gregorio” have written a pair of entrancing early 19th-century mysteries (Critique of Criminal Reason and Days of Atonement) starring Prussian magistrate Hanno Stiffeniis. Also in these pages can be found a look back at The Daughter of Time author Josephine Tey (née Elizabeth Mackintosh), who is herself the star of a new mystery called An Expert in Murder, by Nicola Upson; an “In the Beginning” interview with Rose Lemikan, author of The Blackstone Key; and a recap of the books-to-film transition of Sax Rohmer’s The Mask of Fu Manchu. Oh, and of course the latest issue of Mystery News comes with a ballot for this year’s Barry Awards. I thought I could fill it out and send it back quickly, but have found myself agonizing over a couple of categories--a sure indicator of recent robustness in the genre.

• No slouch herself at offering literary thrills, Mo Hayder (Ritual) suggests some “chilling” reads to enjoy during this summer’s hot weather. You’ll find them here.

• Of the two Ross Macdonald novels most recently reissued (in stylish paperback editions) by Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, my favorite is definitely The Instant Enemy (1968). Its companion, The Blue Hammer (1976), was Macdonald’s 18th private eye Lew Archer novel and paled somewhat by comparison with the three Archer outings that immediately preceded it: The Goodbye Look (1969), The Underground Man (1971), and Sleeping Beauty (1973). But Bruce Grossman gives Hammer a fine write-up today in Bookgasm. “The Blue Hammer,” he explains, “was the last Lew Archer novel written by Ross Macdonald before Alzheimer’s had taken over, and holds all the earmarks of prime Archer material. Deep family secrets aplenty pepper this book, which are all tied to a stolen piece of artwork. For Archer, what seems like a very easy case gets a lot deeper than anyone would have guessed.” Read the whole piece here.

• There was a good piece last week in the Criminal Brief blog about locked-room mysteries. Penned by Hal White, author of The Mysteries of Reverend Dean, if includes his idiosyncratic list of “the best English-language locked-room mystery anthologies” in (or out) of print. Click here to read it all.

• One of the novels I most look forward to reading this fall is Moriarty, the belated follow-up to The Return of Moriarty (1974) and The Revenge of Moriarty (1975), all three featuring Sherlock Holmes’ nemesis, Professor James Moriarty, and written by the late John Gardner. Bish’s Beat has more on Moriarty here.

• I’d like to see statistical proof that posting first chapters of novels on the Web actually stimulates sales. I am not convinced. Nonetheless, the practice of offering such openings has become commonplace. Herewith, the first chapters of Tony Black’s forthcoming novel, Paying for It, and the opening from Tod Goldberg’s introductory Burn Notice tie-in novel, The Fix. Enjoy.

• I find there are few things more satisfying than being introduced to a high-quality crime novelist from long ago whose work I haven’t yet read. August West can be credited with introducing me to the novels of Glenn Canary, a journalist turned novelist who only died in early May of this year. The Sadist? The Damned and the Innocent? The Perfect Plot? I’ll have to see what I can do about getting my hands on some of these.

• Two interviews worth reading: Crime Scraps’ Uriah Robinson (aka Norman Price) talks with Polish writer Marek Krajewski, author of Death in Breslau, a novel that sounds like it’s up my history-loving alley; and New Mystery Reader Magazine chats with Timothy Hallinan, whose novel The Fourth Watcher (a sequel to last year’s A Nail Through the Heart) is new in U.S. bookstores.

• The last time I was in New York City, I didn’t get a chance to visit Edgar Allan Poe’s old cottage in The Bronx. But maybe next time. And by then, a $250,000 renovation of the five-room dwelling should be complete. According to the Association Press, that project will include construction of a new visitors’ center. Work is scheduled to begin on the project next year.

• The Outlander, a debut historical novel by Gil Adamson that already won this year’s Hammett Prize, has also made the shortlist of nominees for the 8th annual ReLit Awards, given to “Canadian authors whose literary works have been published independently.” For the full rundown of nominees, click here.

• And fresh from the success of his first podcast-to-print novel, Jack Wakes Up, Northern California writer Seth Harwood has teamed with blogger-editor Aldo Calcagno to present what they’re calling “the new (and only) podcast site for crime fiction,” CrimeWAV.com. As Harwood explains in an introduction,

CrimeWAV.com is a new podcast series of crime stories that I’m starting with the aim of introducing the work of published crime writers, some of the great folks I’ve been able to meet in the past year, to the podcast crime audience that I’ve developed with my JACK PALMS CRIME podcasts.

I’m doing this for two reasons: I want to bring some of the great work that’s out there by people in the crime writing scene to the crime listeners I’ve developed with my podcast series--I want to give my listeners more great crime content--and I want to help the crime writers I’ve met get their work into the podcast realm so they can benefit from what I think is a great promotional opportunity in podcasting and get more readers/listeners. Basically, it’s a win/win: I’ve got an audience that wants more crime stories and I’ve been fortunate to meet a lot of great crime writers who are happy to get more exposure via the web and podcasts. As I’ve been really lucky and successful to get in on podcasting early, I want to help other writers use these tools to promote their own work.

First up at CrimeWAV.com is Part I of a short story by Vicki Hendricks, “Must Bite,” which originally appeared in Storyglossia.