Writer's Report 2.0

Mystery novelist, Michael Connelly was doing final research in Hong Kong in preparation of promoting his new novel “Nine Dragons”, when he learned of a real life mystery eerily similar to the one in his book. Unlike his book, this real mystery has not been solved.

The saying goes that life imitates art. But that’s the last thing you want when you write crime fiction. You never want to see the things you write about mirrored back to you in real life.

Chungking Mansions is a well-known place to many travelers to Asia. It is sort of a modern Casablanca, a crossroads of the world. It is several cut-rate hotels housed in one large and old building, and all of it above a world bazaar where dozens of languages are spoken, and food and other comfort items from almost any country in Asia can be found and purchased. It is the kind of place…where I checked my back repeatedly when I walked through while researching the book.

The real mystery as well as the fictional one began in the Chunking Mansions

Ani Ashekian was a veteran traveler who enjoyed solo journeys from Toronto, Canada. She came to Hong Kong after visiting mainland China and stayed in a hotel at the Chungking Mansions.

Ani has not been seen since November 10, 2008.

Read the whole story here

This one’s for all you die-hard Mystery fans:

Agatha Christie’s Georgian villa where the writer spent her summers and entertained guests with readings from her thrillers will open to the public for the first time on Saturday, February 28th, after a $7.8 million restoration.

Visitors can see the bedroom where Christie slept, the dining room where she entertained, and the drawing room where she thrilled friends with readings from her latest whodunit.

It took two years to restore the 18th-century home, called Greenway, and the rooms are much as they were when Christie lived there in the 1950’s, complete with books, boxes of chocolates and bouquets of flowers. Even the scratches on the bedroom door made by the family dog remain.

Christie bought Greenway in 1938. It is located near Glampton in Devon, England, about 200 miles southwest of London. She spent her summers there until 1959.

Dame Agatha Christie, and her husband Max Mallowan, in 1946.

Born in Devon in 1890, Christie had deep roots there. It is a region of beaches, dramatic river valleys, hills and wild moorland. Fifteen of her books have Devon settings, including And Then There Were None, and Ordeal by Innocence. Christie died in 1976, at the age of 85.

Christie’s grandson, Mathew Prichard, said he hoped the renovation would let visitors “feel some of the magic and sense of place that I felt when my family and I spent so much time there in the 1950s and ’60s.”

Visitors can see Christie’s bedroom, with its view of grounds sloping down to the River Dart, the formal dining room and a manuscript room full of Christie first editions.

During World War II, the house was used by the U.S. Navy during preparations for D-Day. The home’s restorers have retained a vivid frieze of wartime scenes painted on the library walls by Lt. Marshall Lee, a U.S. Coast Guard war artist. Christie had kept them as a memento of their stay.

Although Christie never wrote any of her novels in Greenway, the drawing room is where friends and family would gather to hear Christie read from her latest manuscript and then try to guess whodunit. It is said that her archaeologist husband, Max Mallowan, would wake from a doze to announce the name of the murderer.

Christie’s heirs donated Greenway to the National Trust nine years ago, but until now only its lush gardens have been open to the public.

Greenway is the mystery-lovers’ Mecca. The National Trust said that once the house has been open for a while, they may even consider holding murder-mystery tours and Christie-themed events.

For die-hard fans, one floor of the main house has been turned into a five-bedroom vacation apartment, available for $3,600 a week in high season. The trust also hopes to offer overnight guests a meal in the dining room where Christie once dined.

Robyn Brown, who manages Greenway on behalf of the National Trust said, “It’s my dream, that on the last night of their stay, we will ring a gong in the hall and they will come down for drinks in the library and then have dinner in the dining room.”

For fans of Christie, what could be better?

In honor of the Edgar Allan Poe’s 200th birthday on Jan. 19, the Mystery Writers of America have compiled a volume of his works — from the best-loved to the more obscure — along with short essays by award-winning authors who cite him as their inspiration.

In the Shadow of the Master (William Morrow, 416 pages, $24.95), edited by Michael Connelly: The beating of the telltale heart still echoes beneath the floorboards. The cask of amontillado still eludes the wretched Fortunato. The raven still croaks, “Nevermore.”

No matter how many times you read them, Edgar Allan Poe’s classic tales never seem to lose their macabre magic.

In the Shadow of the Master was edited by Michael Connelly and includes vignettes by mystery authors from Sue Grafton to Stephen King.

Their essays provide a range of insightful observations. Some authors reminisce about their favorite Poe tales, while others recall their first exposure to his stories. Still others have come back to Poe’s works after many years and describe how their reactions have evolved as they’ve grown older.

Most of the guest essays sparkle. Each is about two to five pages, a quick read, and each resonates with an unmistakable passion for Poe.
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Poor Don, he didn’t quite make it to 2009.

From the New York Times

By Jennifer Lee

Donald E. Westlake, a prolific, award-winning mystery novelist who pounded out more than 100 books and 5 screenplays on manual typewriters during a career of nearly 50 years, died on Wednesday night. He was 75.

Mr. Westlake collapsed as he was headed to New Year’s Eve dinner while on vacation in Mexico, said his wife, Abigail Westlake.

The cause was a heart attack, she said.

Mr. Westlake, considered one of the most successful and versatile mystery writers in the United States, received an Academy Award nomination for a screenplay, three Edgar Awards and the title of Grand Master from the Mystery Writers of America in 1993.

Since his first novel, The Mercenaries, was published by Random House in 1960, Mr. Westlake had written under his own name and several pseudonyms, including Richard Stark, Tucker Coe, Samuel Holt and Edwin West. Despite the diversity of pen names, most of his books shared one feature: They were set in New York City, where he was born.

Mr. Westlake used different names in part to combat skepticism over his rapid rate of writing books, sometimes as many as four a year, his friends said.

“In the beginning, people didn’t want to publish more than one book a year by the same author,” said Susan Richman, his publicist at Grand Central Publishing.

Later in his career, Mr. Westlake limited himself to two pen names, each generally focusing on one primary character: He used his own name to write about an unintentionally comical criminal named John Dortmunder, and as Richard Stark wrote a series about an anti-hero and criminal named Parker.
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Associated Press
By CHRIS TALBOTT

“One Night Stands and Lost Weekends” (HarperCollins, 384 pages, $14.95), by Lawrence Block: Beware the book whose author admits in the introduction he’s afraid to read the stories that follow:

“I’m scared I’ll decide not to publish them after all, and it’s too late for that. So an uncharacteristic attack of honesty compels me to advise you that I am in the curious position of introducing you to a couple of dozen short stories which I myself haven’t read in forty years.”

That’s from one of three introductions Block writes in “One Night Stands and Lost Weekends,” a fun if warmed over collection of the author’s early work, which had already been published in separate collectors’ volumes at the turn of the century.

The stories are just what the title suggests. Quickies sold to pulps and their descendants in the late 1950s and early 1960s in the first part of the book and easily digestible hard-boiled novellas in the second. They’re all easily forgettable — Block, in fact, forgot about a few — but curiously compelling.

Though they mirrored the dreck of the day — full of rapists, murders with semi-plausible twists and an unending line of bombshell blondes pulling a double-cross — Block shows the early promise that would lead him to Grand Master status with the Mystery Writers of America and four Edgar and Shamus awards.
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(New York Times)
By Marilyn Stasio

Tony Hillerman, whose lyrical, authentic and compelling mystery novels set among the Navajos of the Southwest blazed innovative trails in the American detective story, died Sunday at Presbyterian Hospital in Albuquerque, The Associated Press reported.

He was 83 and lived in Albuquerque. The cause was pulmonary failure, according to the AP report.

Hillerman’s evocative novels, which describe people struggling to maintain ancient traditions in the modern world, touched millions of readers, who made them best sellers. But although the themes of his books were not overtly political, he wrote with a purpose, he often said, and that purpose was to instill in his readers a respect for Indian culture. The plots of his stories, while steeped in contemporary crime and its consequences, were invariably instructive about ancient tribal beliefs and customs, from purification rituals for a soldier returned from a foreign war to incest taboos for a proper clan marriage.

“It’s always troubled me that the American people are so ignorant of these rich Indian cultures,” Hillerman once told Publishers Weekly. “I think it’s important to show that aspects of ancient Indian ways are still very much alive and are highly germane even to our ways.”

Hillerman was not the first mystery writer to set a story on Indian land or to introduce a full-blooded Native American detective to crime literature. In 1946 the grand prize in the first short-story competition of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine went to Manly Wade Wellman for the first of two stories he wrote with an Indian protagonist.

But beginning with “The Blessing Way” in 1970 the 18 novels Hillerman set on Southwest Indian reservations featuring Lieut. Joe Leaphorn and Sergeant Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police, brought a new dimension to the character of the traditional genre hero.

In addition to his complex heroes, Hillerman also wrote compassionately and with intimate knowledge of a great range of clansmen from the Navajo, Hopi and Zuni tribes, people with whom he felt a deep affinity because he grew up among those very much like them. “When I met the Navajo I now so often write about, I recognized kindred spirits,” he wrote in an autobiographical essay in 1986. “Country boys. Folks among whom I felt at ease.”
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