Mystery Writers

Mystery solved. The winners of the 2006 Edgar Allan Poe Awards have been announced. The Edgar for best novel went to "Citizen Vince." Whodunit? Author Jess Walter; it's his third novel. The award for best first novel by an American author was won by "Officer Down," by Theresa Schwegel. And the winner for best motion picture screenplay was "Syriana," by Stephen Gaghan.

West Hollywood gets bookish this Sunday with the 11th annual West Hollywood Book Fair . Set in and around the new West Hollywood public library, the event will have panels, readings, comics discussions, things for kids, and even some talk about e-books (that's where you'll find me). The immense lineup of authors who will be there includes film star Andrew McCarthy -- he's an award-winning travel writer who has just published a memoir, "The Longest Way Home. " There will be people to talk about darkness and crime -- many mystery writers, including T. Jefferson Parker, are on the bill.

Joe Gores, a former San Francisco private investigator who became a prize-winning author of hardboiled mysteries such as " Hammett," "Come Morning" and "Spade & Archer," has died. He was 79. A resident of San Anselmo, Calif., Gores died of a stomach hemorrhage Monday at Marin General Hospital in nearby Greenbrae, said Tim Gould, his stepson. Gores, who began his career selling short stories to magazines in the late 1950s, received an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America in 1970 for best first novel, "A Time of Predators.

Last summer, while browsing in a used bookstore in San Luis Obispo, I discovered something I thought no longer existed -- an Agatha Christie novel I had not read. Anyone monitoring my vital signs would have thought I had discovered the next Gnostic gospel or a lost play of Shakespeare's. Clutching it tightly as if someone might snatch it from me, I quickly bought it. I promised myself I would take my time, savor the experience and read only a few pages at a time. Instead, I finished it the next day. Now it resides beside its sisters in my Agatha box, a crate at the foot of my bed. I don't own all of the 66 mystery novels and 14 short-story collections that Christie wrote, but I have most of them and I read them over and over again, in rotation, throughout the year.

A campaign to create a $1-million endowment for the city library system will kick off April 14 with a luncheon featuring three Southern California mystery writers. The nonprofit Anaheim Public Library Foundation, formed in 1995, hopes to establish a permanent endowment by 2002 for buying books and other reading materials, and securing funding to replace or remodel the main city library.

JUNEAU, Alaska -- Murder. Lies. Kidnapping. Corruption. Infidelity. Betrayal. Just everyday fare for your mystery book fan. But these also are subjects that will be dissected, probed and combed over the next week in Alaska during Bouchercon 2007, the yearly conference for mystery writers. During the five-day gathering, readers can rub shoulders with about 225 authors as well as crime scene experts, criminal court judges and even cadaver dogs who sniff out corpses.

Dick Francis, a champion steeplechase jockey in Britain who became a bestselling mystery writer, died Sunday at his home in the Cayman Islands. He was 89. Ruth Cairns, a spokeswoman for Francis, told the Associated Press that the author died of natural causes. He wrote more than 40 novels, many featuring racing as a theme, after retiring from racing in 1957. "I haven't suffered the same injuries as my characters, but I have suffered pain and I know it," he told The Times during a visit to Southern California in 1981.

"Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd?" the literary critic Edmund Wilson asked in a famous petulant essay, alluding to Agatha Christie's most controversial mystery and assaulting them all. Three leading contemporary mystery writers--P.D. James ("Devices and Desires"), Mary Higgins Clark ("Where Are the Children?") and Donald E. Westlake ("Trust Me On This")--provide some answers on who cares, and why, on Sunday morning's edition of "Bookmark" with host Lewis Lapham (10:30 a.m., Channel 28).

A handful of mystery authors will help kick off the opening this weekend of the new Borders Books and Music in Costa Mesa. A ribbon-cutting ceremony for the bookstore, built on the site of the old Mesa Theater at 1890 Newport Blvd., will be at 9 a.m. Friday. At 3 p.m. Saturday, Maxine O'Callaghan ("Only in the Ashes") and Patricia Guiver ("Delilah Doolittle and the Careless Coyotes") will read and sign; at 3 p.m. Sunday, T. Jefferson Parker ("Where Serpents Lie"), Martin J.

Whatever it may reveal about the society, the making and consuming of mystery writing are enjoying boom conditions. The 19th annual Bouchercon, an annual convention of mystery professionals and their fans--named after the late critic Anthony Boucher--drew a record turnout of nearly 900 here over the weekend. The organizers had to stop accepting applications and establish a waiting list as early as last June.

The Cut A Novel George Pelecanos Reagan Arthur / Little, Brown: 304 pp., $25.99 There are two stars in George Pelecanos' new novel, "The Cut. " The first is Spero Lucas, an Iraq war vet who has carved out an informal business as an investigator with a particular talent for finding things - sometimes, not entirely legal things - that have gone lost. The other is Washington, D.C., where the story takes place. Lucas is the flashier of the two. He's in great physical shape, lands women effortlessly, maintains good relationships with his buddies and knows his way around weaponry.

Poets read to rapt audiences, and authors of fiction tried to explain the creative process. Celebrity chefs lured big crowds to sit under a hot sun, and mystery writers answered questions in SRO auditoriums. There was something for almost everyone at the 16th annual Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, held this past weekend on the USC campus. What follows is a sampling of reports on the festival from the Jacket Copy blog. Meeting Ginsberg Before she read a section from "Just Kids," punk poetess Patti Smith set up the audience to laugh.

Joe Gores, a former San Francisco private investigator who became a prize-winning author of hardboiled mysteries such as " Hammett," "Come Morning" and "Spade & Archer," has died. He was 79. A resident of San Anselmo, Calif., Gores died of a stomach hemorrhage Monday at Marin General Hospital in nearby Greenbrae, said Tim Gould, his stepson. Gores, who began his career selling short stories to magazines in the late 1950s, received an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America in 1970 for best first novel, "A Time of Predators.

Michael Connelly is looking to stage a kidnapping. The writer wheels his rented SUV through the streets of Hancock Park. He turns right at 5th Street and Windsor Boulevard, and a two-story villa set back from the street catches his eye. The trash cans are out. A woman in a bathrobe, standing on the front porch, turns to stare. He pulls out his iPhone and takes a picture. He lifts his foot off the brake and idles ahead. He's pleased with what he found: a waist-high bush on the corner, the Hollywood sign in the distance, palm trees angling overhead, a little crack in the sidewalk edging toward the lawn.

Mystery writers can be a dark lot. "When I was growing up, I was always interested in those books, ‘Women Who Kill,' " Megan Abbott, author of "Bury Me Deep," intoned as her audience laughed. She chuckled. "Strange kid." Across the UCLA campus Saturday, there were writerly confessions — and not just from the authors of noirish mystery tales — and political musings. Celebrities reflected on their lives, poets read from their works and a person or two could be found strolling the grounds in costume.

Ed Thomas, the owner of Book Carnival, an independent mystery and suspense specialty bookstore in the city of Orange that has been called "the granddaddy of Orange County mystery bookstores," has died. He was 77. Thomas died of cancer Tuesday at his home in Yorba Linda, said his son Craig. "You wouldn't believe the authors who came by just to visit him and stay with him at his bedside," Craig Thomas said. "For authors to go out of their way to visit him and see how he was doing just told me how well-respected he was."

Americans continue to read mysteries in huge numbers, and hundreds of new authors (many of them women) have been signed on by publishers to feed this appetite for whodunits. This popular genre has spawned a number of successful specialty bookstores throughout the Southland with names such as Sherlock's Home, Scene of the Crime, Mysterious Bookstore, Book'em Mysteries, Dangerous Visions, Mystery Annex, etc.

Now that DNA has joined OD and DOA as part of the MO of homicide detectives, mystery writers have a whole new set of ABCs to keep track of. * That is why 32 of them are huddling this weekend with murder investigators, prosecutors and forensic pathologists above a candy store in Universal City in hopes of learning the lingo of law enforcement, 1990s-style. The crime writers want their future novels and screenplay mysteries to read more like coverage of the O.J. Simpson case than Mickey Spillane.

Dick Francis, a champion steeplechase jockey in Britain who became a bestselling mystery writer, died Sunday at his home in the Cayman Islands. He was 89. Ruth Cairns, a spokeswoman for Francis, told the Associated Press that the author died of natural causes. He wrote more than 40 novels, many featuring racing as a theme, after retiring from racing in 1957. "I haven't suffered the same injuries as my characters, but I have suffered pain and I know it," he told The Times during a visit to Southern California in 1981.

Robert B. Parker, the best-selling author whose long-running "Spenser" private-eye novels updated the genre of hard-boiled detective fiction in the 1970s, has died. He was 77. Parker died Monday of a heart attack at his home in Cambridge, Mass., said his longtime literary agent, Helen Brann. "He was at his desk, working on a new book -- a new Spenser," Brann said. Once dubbed "the doyen of old-school, hard-boiled American pulp," the former English professor at Northeastern University in Boston wrote 60 novels -- 37 of them featuring his tough but literate private eye, Spenser, who debuted in "The Godwulf Manuscript" in 1973.