Mystery Writers

Sailing, sailing the ocean blue, Lawrence Block wrote a novel, just for you. Well, actually he wrote half a novel while sailing from Phuket, Thailand, to Athens aboard the clipper ship Star Flyer. He'd get up at 4 in the morning and go write in the ship's library, where it was "nice and quiet" and he'd put in about 2 1/2 hours, until it was time for breakfast. "Writing on board ship might have affected my penmanship but it didn't affect the writing itself," he said during a recent interview.

"Heroes of mine are walking around here," confided Oscar-winning screenwriter Ted Tally (The Silence of the Lambs), watching the glittery crowd make its way into the Sheraton Hotel's Imperial Ballroom Thursday night. "Elmore Leonard is here. I can't believe I'm in the same room as Elmore Leonard. " Even Hollywood types, it seems, get a little tingly at the annual Edgar Awards banquet of the Mystery Writers of America, where nominees in 11 categories go through a process that incoming MWA president Ross Thomas calls "roughly equivalent to the Oscars.

Margaret Maron's Bootlegger's Daughter won the Edgar Allan Poe Award as the best mystery novel of the year at Friday's annual gathering of the Mystery Writers of America in New York City. Other "Edgars" went to Michael Connelly's The Black Echo (best first novel); Jim Schutze (best short story); Harry Farrell's Swift Justice: Murder and Vengeance in a California Town (best fact crime); Michael Tolkin's screenplay for The Player (film), and Michael Chernuchin and Rene Balcer for an episode of Law & Order (television)

Robin Hathaway Keisman, 79, of Brewerytown, a mystery author who began writing novels in her 50s and whose first book was published 10 years later, died Saturday, Feb. 16, of cancer at a daughter's home in Reston, Va. Mrs. Keisman used her maiden name as her pen name. In the 1980s, with some prodding by her husband, the cardiologist Robert Keisman, she began a novel. "He said to me, 'You always wanted to write. Don't you think it's time to get started?' " Mrs. Keisman told an Inquirer reporter in 2007.

Two big literary conventions booked into town over the weekend, bringing thousands of visitors and hundreds of big-name authors. The New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association (NAIBA) held its event Friday through yesterday at the Marriott. Bouchercon 29, the World Mystery Convention, took place Thursday through yesterday at the Wyndham Franklin Plaza Hotel. More than 730 people representing more than 240 bookstores attended NAIBA. More than 1,700 attended Bouchercon.

Sharon McCone drinks white wine, tools around San Francisco in a red MG and lusts after a handsome Stanford prof she met last year. She exercises regularly, never gains weight and ages barely at all. She's just a tad taller than average, ever so slightly stronger, and considerably braver. Then again, she takes herself a bit too seriously and, when she's mad, shoots off her mouth. Because she has a distaste for guns, her own is likely to be at home when she needs it most. Hey, nobody's perfect.

Homicide hacks, pulp-fiction pugilists . . . detective novelists. If there is still a stigma attached to the once-lowly craft of the mystery scribe - a genre writer whose work is locked into a relatively inflexible framework, often, as the critic Robin W. Winks noted, "with a form as precise as that of a sonnet" - it's a stigma solely in the eyes of a handful of academicians, critics and lofty highbrows. Detective writer Rex Burns has narrowed the prejudice even further, to "a few people in New York City with tilted noses, holed up in ivory towers.

IN THE DEAD OF SUMMER By Gillian Roberts Ballantine / $21 RUNNING FROM THE LAW By Lisa Scottoline HarperCollins / $20 The age of specialization has overtaken the art of detection. Forget the amateur sleuth or general-purpose gumshoe. There are mystery mavens from every imaginable field of endeavor: jockey, architect, clergyman, teacher, lawyer. These last two professions figure prominently in the novels of Philadelphia mystery writers Gillian Roberts and Lisa Scottoline.

Some mystery this is. Even the famous mystery writers who are creating it can't be sure how it will come out! Starting Sunday, National Public Radio's "Weekend Edition" (WHYY-FM/91, 9 to 11 a.m.) will begin what hostess Susan Stamberg calls a "chain mystery novel. " Each chapter will be written - and read - by a different mystery writer. This is an event more likely to produce great fun than literary content, admits Weekend Edition publicist Kathryn Higham. For one thing, the "chapters" of this story are only three pages long.

"Over My Dead Body," a comedy-mystery by Michael Sutton and Anthony Fingleton, suggested by the novel "The Murder League," by Robert L. Fish. Directed by Will Stutts, set by Michael Powers, costumes by Debbie Pokallus, lighting by Jeff Goldstein, sound by Ron Cohen. Presented by the Society Hill Playhouse, 507 S. 8th St. Wed.-Sat. through Feb. 8. On the morning after a dark and stormy night, an American literary agent known for his drinking and nasty disposition is found dead in the reading room of The Murder League, a London club for professional mystery writers.

Robin Hathaway Keisman, 79, of Brewerytown, a mystery author who began writing novels in her 50s and whose first book was published 10 years later, died Saturday, Feb. 16, of cancer at a daughter's home in Reston, Va. Mrs. Keisman used her maiden name as her pen name. In the 1980s, with some prodding by her husband, the cardiologist Robert Keisman, she began a novel. "He said to me, 'You always wanted to write. Don't you think it's time to get started?' " Mrs. Keisman told an Inquirer reporter in 2007.

By Timothy Hallinan Soho Crime. 347 pp. $25 Reviewed by Bruce DeSilva Ever since Dashiell Hammett introduced us to Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon 83 years ago, hundreds of writers have adopted his formula, flooding the bookshelves with wisecracking private eyes who work both sides of the law, disrespect authority, icily stare down gun barrels, and conceal an immutable code of honor beneath a cynical outer shell. This can get awfully tiresome, but every now and then a writer comes along with the imagination and skill to make the whole thing feel fresh and new again.

Donald J. Sobol, 87, author of the popular Encyclopedia Brown series of children's mysteries, has died. Mr. Sobol died in Miami from natural causes July 11, with his wife, Rose, by his side, his son John told the Associated on Press on Monday. The series featured amateur sleuth Leroy "Encyclopedia" Brown, who would unravel local mysteries with the help of his encyclopedic knowledge of facts great and small. The books, first published in the early 1960s, became staples in classrooms and libraries nationwide.

Lilian Jackson Braun, 97, who wrote 29 books in the The Cat Who. . . mystery series, died Saturday in Landrum, S.C. Ms. Braun almost quit writing after the third book was published because popular tastes had changed so much. She took an 18-year hiatus between The Cat Who Turned On and Off and The Cat Who Saw Red , published in 1986. She resumed because her husband, Earl Bettinger, encouraged her to return to writing after she retired in 1984 from the Detroit Free Press, where she worked for 30 years.

Barbara Hayes Callahan, 74, of Cherry Hill, a writer of mystery short stories, died of metastasized breast cancer Monday at Cooper University Hospital in Camden. In 1977, her story "Lavender Lady," published in 1976 in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, was among five finalists for an Edgar Award as the year's best short-story mystery. Between August 1974 and last month, Mrs. Callahan had 20 stories published in Ellery Queen's or Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. Several were reprinted in Japan and Australia; one was adapted for radio in England and another in Italy.

How does a high school dropout become one of the most acclaimed novelists in America? In the case of Daniel Woodrell, it was a combination of native talent and dogged persistence. Over eight books, culminating with this year's rapturously reviewed Winter's Bone, this Ozark native has refined a style that blends vivid, flinty prose, indelible characters, and a powerful sense of place. Woodrell's work is turning heads, particularly in the literary world. "Usually when I get together with people in my profession," says best-selling author George Pelecanos via e-mail, "we talk about sports, movies, politics, cars . . . only occasionally do we bring up books, because there's no mystery there for us. But when someone is doing something in our field that we're unanimously impressed with, it does provoke discussion.

Prince Charles rejoined a yacht sailing in the Aegean Sea yesterday after bad weather forced him to spend three days on the all-male enclave of Mount Athos. Gale-force winds and rough seas battering the area since Wednesday abated in the morning, allowing a speedboat to approach the peninsula and take Charles to the waiting yacht. Charles left Greece later yesterday by plane. He had spent two days walking in woodland and touring some of the 20 monasteries in the semiautonomous community, which bans women and even female animals.

Sailing, sailing the ocean blue, Lawrence Block wrote a novel, just for you. Well, actually he wrote half a novel while sailing from Phuket, Thailand, to Athens aboard the clipper ship Star Flyer. He'd get up at 4 in the morning and go write in the ship's library, where it was "nice and quiet" and he'd put in about 2 1/2 hours, until it was time for breakfast. "Writing on board ship might have affected my penmanship but it didn't affect the writing itself," he said during a recent interview.

Two big literary conventions booked into town over the weekend, bringing thousands of visitors and hundreds of big-name authors. The New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association (NAIBA) held its event Friday through yesterday at the Marriott. Bouchercon 29, the World Mystery Convention, took place Thursday through yesterday at the Wyndham Franklin Plaza Hotel. More than 730 people representing more than 240 bookstores attended NAIBA. More than 1,700 attended Bouchercon.