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Sunday, December 16, 2018

MYSTERY BYTES: Quirky and Interesting Mystery-Related Links

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

18 of the Best Bookish Movies of 2018. BookRiot.

Last weekend I watched Dumplin‘ with my whole family and then after the kids were in bed my husband and I started watching Killing Eve and basically I will never again have such a great weekend of bookish viewing. Probably. Maybe. Although…2018 was so full of great adaptations (and other bookish movies and TV shows) that lightning could strike twice, or every weekend...

Emma Lathen: A Crime Reader's Guide to the Classics: Rediscovering the Queen (s) of Business Crime by Neil Nyren. CrimeReads.

Between 1961 and 1997, Lathen published 24 mysteries featuring John Putnam Thatcher, senior vice president of the Sloan Guaranty Trust, the “third largest bank in the world,” and the first fictional sleuth to spring from the world of Wall Street. The novels were witty, crisp, insightful, intricately plotted, and highly instructive about the ways of the financial universe and the myriad businesses and industries therein...

John le Carré is set to confront “the division and rage at the heart of our modern world” in a new novel set in London in 2018 that will be published next year. The Guardian.

Agent Running in the Field follows a 26-year-old “solitary” man who, “in a desperate attempt to resist the new political turbulence swirling around him, makes connections that will take him down a very dangerous path”, according to publisher Viking.
The novel, Le Carré’s 25th, will be published in October 2019...

The Crime Fiction of Galway by Paul French. CrimeReads.

Galway, on the west coast of Ireland, is the Republic’s sixth largest city, popular with tourists and backpackers and set to be Europe’s official Capital of Culture for 2020. It’s also emerged as a center of Emerald Noir—Irish crime writing that’s gritty, realistic, and concerned with contemporary Ireland. Of course some great examples of Emerald Noir can be found in Dublin, Cork and Limerick, as well as in Northern Ireland (see Crime and the City Belfast), but Galway’s giving them all a run for their money at the moment...

Mise-en-Scène’ and Fritz Lang: The Invaluable, Short-Lived Magazine’s Article on the Master of Darkness. Cinephilia & Beyond.

In 1979, Case Western Reserve University Film Society started publishing a magazine called Mise-en-Scéne, a 70-plus-page cinephilic treasure chest with a series of high-quality articles on some of the most important filmmakers of all time and their work that had left a deep mark on film both in terms of the industry and the art. The articles were accompanied by wonderful high-definition photographs, and even a quick look at the table of contents shows you what kind of an apprehensive and knowledgeable handbook these issues really were...

Not really mystery-related, but a great book article:
8 Old-Lady Novels That Prove Life Doesn't End at 80 by Heidi Sopinka. Electric Lit.

Meaningful roles dry up in Hollywood for women over 30, but for those over 80 it’s a wasteland. At best there is one of two grandmas: kindly or batshit. The same double-bind could be said for older women in literature, who arguably represent one of the most underwritten aspects of female experience. Even when they do manage to get into a book, they almost exclusively face sexism for being “unlikeable.” ...

Here's an article for all my friends: 
How to Declutter some of the hardest things of All: Books. Realtor.com

When you're trying to declutter your home, there are always some easy wins. Old newspapers and a too-small sweater? Recycle one and donate the other to Goodwill. Done! But a French-language copy of "Madame Bovary" from college, or all those beloved "Nancy Drew" books from childhood? For book lovers, parting with these can be a whole lot harder...

Spain's First Book Town: Urueña. Atlas Obscura.

Urueña, Spain. In 2007, Urueña went one step further to enhance its charm, becoming the first villa del libro (Book Town) in Spain. It’s now home to 12 bookstores—and only about 200 people...

Val McDermid: Finding Inspiration After 32 Novels. Crime Reads via Atlantic Monthly.

Whenever a new book comes out, we writers have to find something to talk about. In interviews, at book signings, at literary festivals, we have to persuade readers that ours is the book they want to take home.
Broken Ground is my thirty-second novel. That’s thirty-two lots of questions and interviews, and thirty-two attempts at finding something fresh to say. Or at least, something I can manage to make sound fresh. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not fishing for pity or even sympathy, just trying to explain why you might have heard some of my anecdotes more than once...

And a review of a biography of Edward Gorey! 
Posthumous: the Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey by Mark Dery. Review by Jennifer Szalai. NYT. 

Writers are supposed to have a hard time killing their darlings, but there are a few who apparently thrill to the task. In “Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey,” the cultural critic Mark Dery explains how Gorey was always looking to pare things down. Right up until his death from a heart attack in 2000, at 75, he was relentlessly productive — staging plays, producing puppet shows, illustrating books and publishing a hundred or so little volumes of drawings paired with arch, taciturn texts — while taking care to keep it all “very brief,” as Gorey put it, in pursuit of what Dery calls “an almost haiku-like narrative compression.” 

Take A Virtual Murder Tour of Medieval London by Matthew Taub. Atlas Obscura

In late October 1323, on the eve of the feast of Saints Simon and Jude and in the shadow of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, a heist went awry. According to the coroner’s report, a Frenchman known as John de Chartres had just supped with his accomplices, William of Woodford and his wife Johanna, at their Milk Street residence. They crept over to Bread Street and broke into the home they had targeted, and systematically looted it as planned. But then William noticed that “John was then filled with remorse.” Unable to risk a rat, William politely asked John to light a fire in the kitchen. As John knelt over the flames William hit him with an ax, and then attempted to burn the evidence—namely, John. 
 

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