Sunday, October 28, 2018

MYSTERY BYTES: Interesting & Quirky Mystery-Related Postings

Here's my weekly Round-Up of interesting and quirky mystery-related articles and postings on the Internet. Just wanted to share in case you missed these. Click on the link to read the entire story.

How Agatha Christie's wartime Nursing role gave her a lifelong taste for poison. The Guardian

Agatha Christie loved her poisons, whether a glass of champagne spiked with cyanide, a dose of lethal strychnine doled out at a country manor house, or, at the heart of her A Caribbean Mystery, some cosmetics laced with belladonna. In fact, deadly toxins are deployed in more than 30 of her whodunnits.

Jeff Abbott on what Happens when your Crime Library Goes up in Smoke. CrimeReads. 

The lightning bolt blasted down from the fast-moving summer storm, exploding into our roof, through our attic, and into the guest bedroom. Fire erupted on the bed. My sons put out that fire in the bedroom, but the roof and attic were ablaze. Within two minutes, my family were out of the house, with our pets, pulling our cars out of the garage, as the flames spread. Despite the heavy rain, smoke already wreathed our home. We got out with the clothes we had on our backs. We were safe. We watched our home burn as multiple fire departments responded, as news crews and the Red Cross arrived, as dozens of our neighbors gathered around us to offer comfort, as our family tried to grapple with what seemed an unimaginable new reality.

How California's almond harvest has greated a golden opportunity for bee thieves. RevealNews


The crime scene was a mess of boxes, some half-assembled, others scattered across patches of dried grass and partially gouged to raw wood. The victims scrambled about looking for food and water. There were thousands of them. Maybe millions.

The Best Crime Documentaries on Netflix. Thrillist

The past several years have seen a veritable explosion in true crime stories, across virtually every platform. You can barely open a web browser without stumbling across a video, podcast, long-form story, or some other piece of content that exposes a horribly tragic crime and/or a horribly tragic justice process. The lesson, as always: When a nation gives you a corrupt and punitive justice system biased against minorities and the poor, make a documentary about it. 

How to Lend a Kindle Book. BookRiot 

One of my favorite things about books is sharing and discussing them with my friends and family. When I got my first Kindle ereader, I was thrilled with the money I could save on ebooks, my new ability to borrow ebooks from the library, and how easy it made reading while traveling, but I was disappointed that I wouldn’t be able to share the books I bought with others. Luckily, someone taught me how to lend a Kindle book and share the reading love.

The Mother Archetype in Crime Fiction. Catriona McPherson. CrimeReads.

There are precious few happy kids of loving mothers in crime fiction. Perhaps that’s inevitable, since crime fiction shows us flawed individuals, at times of great crisis. Fiction in general might offer up Mrs Bennet, Marge Simpson, Marmee Marsh, Molly Weasley and Lorelei Gilmore but in the mystery world it’s slim pickings. Until you turn to the dark side, that is . . . True villains abound. With them, though, we also find more nuanced portrayals of mothers, struggling, out of their depth, trying but failing.

Five Novelists Imagine Trump's Next Chapter. Joseph Finder, Laura Lippman, Jason Matthews, Zoe Sharp, and Scott Turow. New York Times. 

An Interview with Alan Bradley. TheReadingLists

And with Halloween coming up this week, don't miss: 

Halloween Crime Fiction: A List. MysteryFanfare

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