Monday, the Short Mystery Fiction Society announced the winners of the 2017 Derringer Awards. The Derringer Awards honor excellence in short mystery fiction of varying lengths (up to 20,000 words). Below is a list of all of this year's winners.
Who’s the most famous lawyer-author of all time? Nope, not John Grisham. Here are some hints: Last week was his birthday. He grew up in a log cabin. He wore a tall top hat. And, oh yeah, he helped free the slaves.
The theater world has long been a prime setting for mystery and mayhem. Shakespeare, that homicidal scribe, virtually carpeted the stage with slain corpses. The murderers he created are numerous: Richard III, Othello, Titus Andronicus, Lear’s daughter Goneril, Macbeth (both He and She) and a whole squad of Caesar-skewering assassins—whose best-known member, Brutus, made this…
I recently bought a Kindle Fire. (Don’t ask, I have no idea how it works; haven’t yet opened the box.) The first thing I did when I got home was to log onto the Kindle website and spend nearly an hour browsing the short mystery fiction collection. Giddy with the prospect of so many short…
Like most members of a certain generation, I can sing a verse or two of the Simon and Garfunkel song “Scarborough Fair/Canticle.” Even those who don’t remember an entire verse will be familiar with the line, “parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme” which is repeated no less than five times throughout the song, which in turn…
This year Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine celebrates the seventieth anniversary of its first issue, which included stories by such leading lights as Dashiell Hammett, Margery Allingham, and Cornell Woolrich, among others, plus a story by author-editor Ellery Queen, pseudonym of cousins Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee. On my fourteenth birthday, a favorite aunt gave me…
Late last week, the Crime Writers of Canada hung honors proudly upon the winners of this year’s Arthur Ellis Awards, given in 6 categories to Canadians or Canadian citizens abroad, as well as the “Unhanged Arthur,” awarded to the best first crime novel by an unpublished author. Louise Penny, who’s having a positively monotonous winning…
