12/30/05

It appears that some unsavory creatures have sent millions of spam emails purporting to be from the blackravenpress.com domain. If you received junk mail that looked like it came from us, please be aware that we do not spam and only contact you by email regarding your subscription if there is a problem or question.

Updated the Publishers page to include links to Bitter Lemon Press and Europa Editions. Added the excerpt to the James Sallis interview to the Sallis page and updated the Authors page. Updated the Calendar page to include the Arizona Book Festival, Hardboiled Heroes & Cozy Cats 2006 and the Ann Arbor Book Festival.

12/21/05

The December/January 2006 issue of Mystery News was mailed Monday, December 19, 2005. Our cover interview (by James Clar) is of James Sallis, whose newest work, Drive, is hitting the 10 best of 2005 lists of a slew of major newspapers and mystery mavens. Drive is published by Poisoned Pen Press. Other highlights of this issue include articles on Nancy Drew's 75 years of sleuthing (by Colleen Barnett) and L.A. Confidential's 15 years as a noir classic; and Steve Miller's "In the beginning" column on Chris Knopf, whose debut novel, The Last Refuge, came out earlier this year. Marv Lachman's "Out of the Past" column is on Dorothy B. Hughes, whose classic, In a Lonely Place, was republished by the Feminist Press a couple of years ago. Dave Magayna reviews audiobooks by Eileen Dreyer and James W. Hall in his "The Sound of Mystery" column. And our usual columns, reviews, previews and convention calendar. Updates to related pages on the site will come in a day or so...

The Wolfe Pack presented the 2005 Nero Wolfe award to Lee Child for The Enemy at the Black Orchid Banquet on December 3, 2005 in New York.

Updated the Calendar page to remove outdated info.

12/3/05

Eddie Muller has founded the Film Noir Foundation to find and preserve films in danger of being lost or irreparably damaged, and to ensure that high quality prints of these classic films remain in circulation for theatrical exhibition to future generations. According to the Foundation's website,

11/8/05

Stuart Kaminsky has been named the 2006 Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America's board of directors. The presentation will be made at the annual Edgar Awards dinner on April 27, 2006, at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York.

Kaminsky is the author of 50 published novels, five biographies, four textbooks, and more than three dozen short stories. The six-time Edgar nominee, who won for his novel "A Cold Red Sunrise" in 1989, is a past president of the organization. He taught for 16 years at Northwestern University before becoming a professor at Florida State, where he headed the Graduate Conservatory in Film and Television Production until leaving to pursue his writing full-time.

Kaminsky will join Marcia Muller on a list of Grand Masters that includes Robert B. Parker, Elmore Leonard, Lawrence Block, Donald Westlake, Tony Hillerman, P.D. James, Joseph Wambaugh, Ira Levin, Ellery Queen, Daphne du Maurier, Graham Greene, James M. Cain, Rex Stout, Agatha Christie, and Raymond Chandler.

The Crime Writers Association announced the winners of the balance of the 2005 Dagger Awards, which were presented at the CWA Dagger Awards Lunch in London earlier today.

Dagger of Daggers Award: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John Le Carre (1963)
Gold Dagger for Fiction: Silence of the Grave by Arnaldur Indridason (Harvill Secker)
Silver Dagger for Fiction: Deadly Web by Barbara Nadel (Headline)
The John Creasey Memorial Dagger: Running Hot by Dreda Say Mitchell (Maia Press)
The Ian Fleming Steel Dagger: Brandenburg by Henry Porter (Orion)
The Short Story Dagger: "No Flies on Frank" by Danuta Reah from Sherlock Magazine (Issue 64)
The Dagger in the Library: Jake Arnott
Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction: On the Run by Greg & Gina Hill (Hutchinson)

10/26/05

Our web site is back! It was down for about 2 days because our web hosting company's data center in South Florida lost power as a result of Hurricane Wilma. Service was restored in the early morning hours of October 26. We apologize if you tried to get to the page and were told it didn't exist. Our emails are routed through the same data center, so there may be brief delays in responses.

Updated the Calendar page to include the MWA Symposium and the Edgar Allan Poe banquet, both in late April 2006.

And here's info on another mystery writing contest with cash prizes ($10,000 Best New Play; $5,000 Most Promising New Writer; $2,500 Best New Screenplay or Teleplay). The River Park Center in Owensboro, KY is sponsoring “Discovering New Mysteries”, and is accepting submission of original plays, screenplays and teleplays. Deadline for submissions is November 30, 2005. The “Festival Final 12” will be selected in January 2006, in conjunction with their first annual mystery writers’ festival. According to the website, this will be the only new works festival in the English-speaking world specializing in “Discovering New Mysteries”. Click here for more info.

10/24/05

The October/November 2005 issue was mailed today. Click here or here for information about its contents.

Updated the Calendar page to include the International Conference on the Book, American Library Association Midwinter meeting, LA Times Festival of Books, Portland (OR) Wordstock Festival, Harriette Austin Writers Conference, and the Book Passage Mystery Writing Conference.

And now for something completely different. The Great Mustard Mystery Contest, a writing contest open to writers and aspiring writers of all ages. Chapter One of Murder at the Mustard Museum is complete and appears in the 2005-06 catalog of the Mount Horeb Mustard Museum and on this web site. Contestants will write their best Chapter 2 and a summary of how the story turns out for the opportunity to win the Grand Prize of $5,000. There's even a "Young Writers" division for high-school students, with its own Grand Prize of $250. Thank you to my pal Sara Blake for bringing this to my attention.

10/21/05

Tonight Noreen Wald, Executive VP of the Mystery Writers of America, announced that Bonnie Claeson and Joe Guglielmelli, proprietors of the Black Orchid Bookshop, will be recipients of the MWA's Raven Award at next year's Edgar Allan Poe banquet. The Raven is a special award given or outstanding achievement in the mystery field outside the realm of creative writing. Previous recipients include mystery bookstores/owners (including the Poisoned Pen, Rue Morgue, Mysterious Bookstore and Murder by the Book), readers of the year (including Bill Clinton and Dorothy Kilgallen), institutions (Poe Museum, Mercantile Library) and our own Marv Lachman, for his contributions to mystery fandom. Regular readers of Mystery News know that the Black Orchid is my home away from home and that Joe has been an occasional contributor to MN. Bonnie and Joe are wonderful ambassadors of the genre and dear friends. I am so pleased to see their efforts honored by the MWA Board.

Book news - Reed Farrel Coleman and Ken Bruen are collaborating on a novel that will be called Tower. According to Coleman, the book will be done early in the new year. It sounds like it will be terrific.

10/17/05

The Crime Writers' Association has announced that the winner of the The Ellis Peters Historical Dagger is Dark Fire by C.J. Sansom.

You may not be counting, but we've been! The October/November issue will be the 50th published by Black Raven Press. To celebrate, we are including several retrospectives in this over-sized issue that features in interview with Michael Connelly (by Chris Aldrich) on the front cover. The new issue will be in the mail a week from today - other highlights of this issue include an interview of Margaret Frazer by Virginia R. Knight. Frazer is the author of the popular series featuring Dame Frevisse set in the fifteenth century. Steve Miller's "In the beginning" column checks in with Edie Claire, Stan Jones and Marcia Talley - who were brand-new authors when Steve profiled in his first year. Marv Lachman's "Out of the Past" column takes a look at what he was reading 60 years ago. Reed Andrus interviews Jeff Abbott, whose eighth novel, Panic, is the first to be published in hardcover. Dave Magayna offers a change of pace with a "The Sound of Mystery" column focused on the sounds of Bouchercon. Pam Lawrence interviews Andrew Taylor, who's been called "the most underrated mystery writer in Britain today". Gary Warren Niebuhr interviews Terence Faherty, author of the Owen Keane and Scott Elliott series. And James Clar reflects on Raymond Chandler's essay, "The Simple Art of Murder". Of course, we include our usual columns, reviews, previews and convention calendar.

Updated the Back Issues and Authors pages to include info related to the new issue. Updated the Calendar page to add the Miami International Book Fair in mid-November, Love is Murder and Murder in the Magic City, which will both be held on the first weekend of February 2006, South Carolina Book Festival in late February, as well as the Virginia Festival of the Book, March 22-26. Also added links to the Crime Lab Project, founded by Jan Burke, to our home page and our General Links page.

10/3/05

Our Bouchercon photos are finally up, along with the photos I took in Chicago during my extra few days there. Lots of photos from the river, taken during an architectural cruise.

The Crime Writers' Association announced the nominees for its 2005 Dagger Awards, most of which will be presented at the CWA Dagger Awards Lunch in London on November 8, 2005.

9/14/05

Along with others in the mystery fan community, we were incredibly saddened to learn that Sue Feder died September 9. Sue was already an icon in mystery fandom when I met her around in the late 1990s. She was known for being an expert on the works of Edith Pargeter (aka Ellis Peters, author of the Brother Cadfael series), and in more recent years she founded the Historical Mystery Appreciation Society. You can read her obituary here, She'd been battling lymphoma since 1998. We will miss her.