MWA Announces 2024 Edgar Award Nominations
Rare Books Are a Hot Collectible. Here’s How to Get Started.
Two Case-Shattering Clues Point to the Real Name—and Face—of Jack the Ripper
While Hiding From the Nazis in an Attic, a Jewish Man Created 95 Issues of a Satirical Magazine
A princess’s psalter recovered? Pieces of a 1,000-year-old manuscript found
First Known Piece of Mail Sent Using a Stamp Goes to Auction
New words are spreading faster than ever—thanks to teenage girls
Rare copy of ‘The Amazing Spider-Man’ No 1 sells for more than £1m ($1.38 million US)
How to spot a liar: 10 essential tells – from random laughter to copycat gestures
A Sherlock Holmes birthday itinerary: Trains, tweed and the Wessex Cup
Her bridal photos disappeared 30 years ago. A stranger just found them. [if you’re wondering why this story is included, it is not only charming, but read it to see what their day job was!]
Idris Elba urges stronger action on knife crime
US School Shooter Emergency Plans Exposed in a Highly Sensitive Database Leak
Appeals court blocks Texas from enforcing book rating law
Florida law led school district to pull 1,600 books — including dictionaries
Mexico urges investigation after cartels found with U.S. Army weapons
How the cops are boxing in ransomware hackers
Ex-Army National Guard Recruiter Jailed for Sexually Abusing Child on Military Base
A Staggering New Clue on D.B. Cooper’s Tie Has Blown the 52-Year-Old Case Wide Open
Cascadia: Crime Fiction in the Pacific Northwest
Last known set of remains linked to Green River killer identified as Everett teen
As book battles rage, WA Senate votes to make it harder to shut down a library
The new Ballard bookstore devoted to the ancient art of books
A Woman Hid This Secret Code in Her Silk Dress in 1888—and Codebreakers Just Solved It
Retired Oakland judge has shocking theory about infamous Lindbergh kidnapping. And it’s catching on
Are fingerprints unique? Not really, AI-based study finds
Irish Claddagh rings have an unexpected history—it involves pirates.
Inside the Crime Rings Trafficking Sand
Hit Men Are Easy to Find in the Movies. Real Life Is Another Story.
A Strange 21st-Century Revival: The Train Robbery
What’s Really Behind the Tik Tok ‘Mob Wife Aesthetic’?
collieshangie (n.): from the Scots dictionary: “noisy dispute, uproar, a dog-fight”
Judy Blume Wins ‘Bravery in Literature’ Award
Lynda La Plante and James Lee Burke share Diamond Dagger lifetime award
Science fiction awards held in China under fire for excluding authors
National Book Critics Circle Awards Nominees for 2023
What Booksellers Can Teach Us About Reading, Writing and Publishing
How an Epic History of the Mafia Came out of a Chance Meeting with a Literary Legend
‘A legend in the literary world’ keeps S.F.’s City Lights shining
Catching Up with Louise Penny in Iceland
‘Freedom begins with a book’: incarcerated people to judge new US literary award
A Celebration of Reporters in Cozy Mysteries
It’s Time to Rewrite the Rules of Historical Fiction
James Grippando: 30 Years of Lightning Bolts, Percolators, and other Sources of Inspiration
Agatha Christie: The Indian hotel murder that inspired the queen of crime
Death of a Novelist: The 1911 Murder That Changed New York Gun Laws
Shelf-absorbed: eight ways to arrange your bookshelves – and what they say about you
How Nellie Bly and Other Trailblazing Women Wrote Creative Nonfiction Before It Was a Thing
Breaking up with Goodreads: The best book-logging apps for 2024
C.J. Box Isn’t Afraid to Wrangle With Issues Close to Home
A novel’s risqué publicity campaign has angered some book influencers
>James Bond’s Literary Life, After Ian Fleming
Feb. 10: Mike Lawson signs Kingpin, his new DeMarco, Magnolia Books, noon
Feb. 13: Susan Elizabeth Phillips with Christina Dodd and Jayne Ann Krentz, Third Place/LFP, 7pm
Feb 15: Jeffrey Siger signs At Any Cost, Third Place/LFP, 7pm
Feb 24: Mike Lawson signs Kingpin, his new DeMarco, Barnes & Noble/Silverdale, noon
[see JB’s review of the new DeMarco below]
blowhard (n.): also blow-hard, “blustering person,” 1840, a sailor’s word (from 1790 as a nickname for a sailor), perhaps originally a reference to weather and not primarily meaning “braggart;” from blow (v.1) + hard (adv.). However, blow (v.1) in the sense of “brag, boast, bluster, speak loudly” is attested from c. 1300 and blower had been used since late 14th C. as “braggart, boaster, one who speaks loudly” (in Middle English translating Latin efflator, French corneur).
>James Bond is set to enter public domain: What this means for next 007 movie future
Was ‘The Leopard Man’ Hollywood’s First Slasher Film?
Rian Johnson Explained the Literary Roots of “Knives Out” Films
Wild Things: this 90s erotic thriller is smarter than you may remember
10 Movies Where The Killer’s Identity Is Never Revealed
The 12 Best Mystery Board Games of 2024
‘American Nightmare’ Shows the Wild Truth Behind a So-Called Real Gone Girl Case
How ‘The Sopranos’ began as a comedy about a mother
The 20 Best, Worst, and Strangest Hercule Poirot Portrayals of All-Time, Ranked
Shane’s Lot: How a 1949 Gun-Toting Loner Still Rides Through American Literature
How NBC’s ‘Dateline’ took back its true-crime throne
Memento: One of the Most Important Sundance Successes Could Never Happen Today
How Cord Jefferson turned a novel about race into American Fiction – the year’s buzziest comedy
braggart (n.): “a boaster,” 1570s, formerly also braggard, from French bragard (16th C.), with pejorative ending (see -ard) + braguer “to flaunt, brag,” perhaps originally “to show off clothes, especially breeches,” from brague “breeches” (see bracket (n.)). There may be an element of codpiece-flaunting in all this.
Also as an adjective, “vain, boastful” (1610s). The word in English has been at least influenced by brag (v.), even if, as some claim, it is unrelated to it. Bragger “arrogant or boastful person,” agent noun from brag (v.), is attested in English from late 14th C. and has become practically a variant of this word.
Jan. 1: David Soul, ‘Starsky and Hutch’ and Magnum Force Actor, Dies at 80
Jan. 6: Cindy Morgan, ‘Caddyshack’ and ‘Tron’ Actress, Dies at 69
Jan.12: Edward Jay Epstein, investigative journalist and skeptic, dies at 88
Jan. 12: Leon Wildes, lawyer who fought John Lennon’s deportation, dies at 90
Jan. 26: Marc Jaffe, Publisher of Paperback Hits, Is Dead at 102
Jan. 28: Harry Connick Sr., lightning-rod longtime New Orleans DA, dies at 97
Jan. 29: N Scott Momaday, Pulitzer-winning Native American novelist, dies aged 89
Jan 4: The House Was Charming, but Came With a Catch: A Murder Took Place There
Jan. 6: Glasgow whisky thief swiped rare £20k Macallan James Bond bottles from Eurocentral warehouse
Jan. 9: ‘Borgata’ Review: Family History [as in The Mob]
Jan. 11: A Murderous Gravestone Grudge Carved a New Law Into Stone
Jan. 12: 7 Wild Stories From the Prohibition Era
Jan 13: What’s in Those Huge Suitcases? $125 Million in Cash
Jan 14: Murdered Dad Revealed to Be Hitman Wanted by Interpol
Jan. 16: The Life and Times of William J. Flynn, the “Bulldog Detective”
Jan. 24: Mystery deepens over Kansas City men found dead in friend’s frozen backyard
Jan. 25: How a Medieval Murder Map Helped Solve a 700-Year-Old London Cold Case
Jan. 26: The WWII Treasure Map That Caused A Modern Day Hunt
Jan. 29: Dying man who stole Dorothy’s Wizard of Oz ruby slippers escapes jail term
nugatory (adj.): “trifling, of no value; invalid, futile,” c. 1600, from Latin nugatorius “worthless, trifling, futile,” from nugator “jester, trifler, braggart,” from nugatus, past participle of nugari “to trifle, jest, play the fool,” from nugæ “jokes, jests, trifles,” a word of unknown origin.
I wrote a series Featuring Crooked House, Rough on Rats, & Children who Kill — here’s the link to the rest of the series!
From the Office of Spoilers: If you’ve not read Crooked House by Agatha Christie, I suggest you do — then read my vintage true crime posts as one directly impacts the other. However, if you’ve no qualms with knowing the ending of a book before you begin it, read on. Either way, you’ve been warned.
Now, on with the show.
According to experts, far more learned than I, Agatha Christie’s publisher, William Collins (of Collins Crime Club fame), found the ending of Crooked House so shocking he requested Christie change it.
She declined.
By leaving the novel untouched, Crooked House now stands as one of the best twist endings in Christie’s entire catalogue of works (second only to The Murder of Roger Ackroyd — in my humble estimation). Though, on reflection, I’m not sure exactly why the revelation of Aristide Leonides’ murderer harkens such disbelief. Within moments of meeting our malefactor, they give us their motive; Charles Hayward’s Old Man practically spells out the whys & wherefores a few pages later, and Charles himself catches sight of the penultimate clue. Yet, for the past seventy-four years, the solution continues to blindside readers. And therein lies Christie’s cunning, the ability to mark and exploit our collective blindspots….…..Because how often, really, would you look at a kid and see a poisoner?
Turns out, more often than you’d think.
Some follow the pattern set by Crooked House’s thirteen year old baddie Josephine Leonides, whose motive for murdering her grandfather was his refusal to pay for her ballet lessons. By adult eyes, Josephine’s reason seems childish, and despite her being fictional — she’s not alone in this brand of flawed rationale. In my research for this set of posts, I’ve discovered kids who’ve killed because they were rebuked too often by their mother, because their father thwarted their ambition to become a train robber, and because they wanted to see if their “chubby” playmate’s insides resembled that of pig’s (that was a singularly gruesome crime).
However, it’s the crimes of Gertrude Taylor, a case I’ll explore in more detail in this series, which reminded me forcibly of Josephine’s puerile impulse to pick up a bottle of poison. Not only did she target her nearest and dearest, but she did so so her brother wouldn’t take his upright organ with him when he moved house.
Yet other kids find themselves following (roughly) in the obsessive footsteps of the Tea Cup Poisoner.
Graham Young’s fascination with poisons not only led to an in-depth study into the subject, at the age of fourteen he started experimenting with them….on his family and friends. In some respects, Young’s diabolical deeds are unique. His ability to dazzle druggists with his knowledge to procure deadly substances like thallium, antimony, atropine, aconitine, and digitalis sets him apart from most other child poisoners.
However, the overwhelming obsession that led to Young’s abominable “experimentation” is not.
Seventy years before and across the pond, another fourteen-year-old named Ella Holdridge found herself utterly transfixed, not by poisons, but by death. Whilst her family and friends considered it an odd fixation for a young girl, no one thought much about it. Until the summer of 1892, when, due to a distinct lack of local funerals she could attend, Ella took it upon herself to supply the local churchyard with a fresh corpse….Another case I’ll cover in the next few weeks.
Above and beyond Gertrude Taylor and Ella Holdridge’s ages, alleged crimes, and underdeveloped moral muscles — one more feature unifies this pair of kid killers: A self-made man who built his empire upon the back of dead rats.
Ephraim Stockton Wells.
My 52 Weeks With Christie: A.Miner©2023
Puppy Wiggles
I found out last year that I am to be the Fan Guest Of Honor at Left Coast Crime in Seattle this April – https://leftcoastcrime.org/2024/ – and I was amazed and stunned and deeply humbled. And I puppy wiggled like a fool. Because of course, that’s what you do.
Then Jim Thomsen, who’s editing the anthology of short stories commissioned for this particular Left Coast Crime convention, asked me if I’d like to submit a short story, 2000 words or so. Would I be interested?
More puppy wiggling, and giggling, and gasping, and holy cats. So I submitted a short story about an old lady assassin riding the buses and trains.
Jim gently and firmly rejected my submission in the nicest possible way.
So I asked if I could try again, please please please, and because he’s a nice guy, he agreed. So I frowned and thought and talked with friends and I came up with another story, this time about a bookseller in Pioneer Square who gets sent on a weird mission to other indie bookstores.
Jim accepted it.
I may have lost weight from the excessive puppy wiggling. And then I let it go, and started writing more just for me, and I’m now publishing a story a week on Substack – Fran’s Ramblings – and it’s keeping me quite busy.
But then. Oh, my dears, but then. Jim sent me these photos:
And there it was! My name ON A BOOK! Sure, it’s last, and it should be because look at those other names! HOLY CATS!
Now is the time to take a moment to admire the work that Jim’s put into this gorgeous book, and thank Down & Out Press for taking on publication, and applaud Bill Cameron for it’s amazing design. This is going to be huge fun.
I don’t have pre-order information yet, but when I do, rest assured that I’ll let you know. But for now, this is a Big Deal for me, and I had to share it.
I’ll be on a couple of panels at the conference – and Amber and JB will be joining me on at least one! Yay! – so if you happen to be in the area, I’d love to see you and catch up! I suspect we all would. It could be a party!
But for the moment, I’m going back to puppy wiggling because I’m gonna be a published author! Whee!
An important and timely book, Prequel outlines and details the Fascist plots in America, in the 30s and 40s, to over-through the US government. If you listened to Rachel Maddow‘s podcast Ultra about this ugly chunk of American history, you’ll be familiar with the names and events. In the book, she lays it out is all of its glorious, gory details. And it is worth the time of everyone concerned about the health of democracy here – or anywhere – to digest the story.
The first part of the book deals with the way the Nazis studied US racial laws to help them sculpt their anti-Jewish laws. She then moves into how the Nazi government shaped and funded home-grown fascism into a weapon against the need for the US to join the fight against Hitler. The amount of money funneled into the plan is staggering. And it all stinks of, and is a pattern for, the way foreign actors have monkeyed with our elections and social media. You cannot read this book without feeling the creeping echo of efforts exposed during the last election – and surely ones yet to come in this year’s contest.
The last of the book covers the work to hold those behind the scheme to legal responsibility. If your soul isn’t depressed by what they did, it certainly will be by the failure of these sedition cases. Again, the troubling echo of history…
Maddow has a masterful way of flowing the story smoothly, tossing in the odd phrase to convey scorn, horror, or astonishment that accompanies the story. “Star journalist Allen Drury used the erratic and cantankerous Langer in his 1963 book, “A Senate Journal”, to illustrate the Senate’s unsettling capacity for growing and empowering mean old weirdos.” ~ Sigh ~ what’s changed?
Allow her to introduce you to a new raft of American heroes. You’ve probably never heard of them but you owe your country to them.
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And now for some sparkling fun!
You’ve heard me and Fran and Bill rave about Mike Lawson‘s books and talent. Kingpin, the 17th DeMarco novel, is no different… except that it forced me to think of his books in a new way. It was Bill who first characterized the Lawson’s writing as “smooth” – which it is. But it struck me reading Kingpin – I don’t think I’ve said this before – that his books are smart. Not just that they’re intelligent, that he always captures something current in the plots, it is more than that:
A Lawson book is well constructed. The story unfolds crisply and at a nice pace that draws the reader along. The characters are interesting and convincing, not cut from thin board. They are they need to be, unique and who they are for a reason. Sure, they serve the plot but the plot moves due to them as well. If you sit back and think about it at the last page, everything about the stories are inevitable.
According to the website we use for our Words of the Month, the adjective smart is “from 1718 in cant as “fashionably elegant;” by 1798 as “trim in attire,” “ascending from the kitchen to the drawing-room c. 1880” [Weekley]. For sense evolution, compare sharp (adj.); at one time or another smart also had the extended senses in sharp.”
And that, in short, is a Mike Lawson novel – trim and elegant.
One more note: the story’s “macguffin”, the thing at the center of the plot, reminded me of Laurence Gough’s Accidental Deaths. In it, his Vancouver BC homicide cops investigate a number of deaths as murder. It turns out that they were all, as the title says, accidental. Gough’s books are terrific and as smart as Mike’s. That Lawson was equally talented to be able to build a terrific story around such an idea was, well, smart.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I also recommend three new series: “Monsieur Spade”, “Criminal Record”, and “True Detective: Night Country”
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Key to a long life? Dr Pepper, says 101-year-old US army veteran
BUY SMALL ~ SUPPORT SMALL
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I know, I know, you’re going to say, “Oh look, Fran’s touting a book by William Kent Krueger. So what? She always does.” It’s true. I do.
A while ago, I wrote a couple of posts about a trip to San Francisco and taking the Dashiell Hammett Walking Tour. It took me a couple of weeks but I hunted down a copy of Don Herron’s 
Seattle Mystery Bookshop 