Bethesda Meets Up with Mystery

The 23rd annual Malice Domestic mystery convention returned this year to Bethesda for the first time since it was located here for eight years in the 1990s.  The national nonprofit put its stamp on favorite mysteries with the prestigious Agatha Awards. 

Louise Penny’s Bury Your Dead won Best Novel; it’s the sixth in her Chief Inspector Armand Gamache series. The award for Best Nonfiction went to John Curran’s Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks: 50 Years of Mysteries in the Making, which reveals the secrets of the handwritten volumes of notes, lists and drafts discovered in 2004. The book includes two Hercule Poirot short stories never before published. 

Malice doesn’t neglect young readers, either.  This year’s Agatha for Best Children’s/Young Adult Novel went to a ghost story that also tackles racial and other serious issues, The Other Side of Dark by Sarah Smith.  The book beat out tween and teen offerings from best-selling adult authors Kathy Reichs and John Grisham.

Best First Novel went to Avery Ames’ engaging mystery, The Long Quiche Goodbye, whose sleuth is proprietor of a cheese shop.  (Gotta love a good punny title, of which there are many in the “cozy” mystery genre.)   Ames beat out Northern Virginian Alan Orloff (Diamonds for the Dead, set in Reston) and horse-breeder/writer Sasscer Hill of Upper Marlboro, Md. (Full Mortality, set at Laurel Park race track), among other authors.

Best Short Story went to Mary Jane Maffini’s “So Much in Common,” which appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine September/October 2010 issue. Local author Barb Goffman was also a nominee for her story, “Volunteer of the Year,” first published in the 2010 anthology Chesapeake Crimes: They Had It Comin'. 

Among this year’s onsite honorees were Sue Grafton--Lifetime Achievement (Grafton pens the popular Kinsey Milhone alphabet mysteries), Carole Nelson Douglas--Guest of Honor (she writes the Midnight Louie series, featuring a detecting feline), Donna Andrews--Toastmaster (the Reston woman authors two series, one with a female blacksmith and the other with an Artificial Intelligence Personality) and Anne Murphy--Fan Guest of Honor (the Rockville woman has volunteered at Malice all 23 years).

The  “Fatal Fashionistas”  panel included Ellen Byerrum of Alexandria, Va., who writes the Lacey Smithsonian series about a reluctant fashion reporter in Washington, D.C., “The City that Fashion Forgot.”  Byerrum’s seventh book is Shot Through Velvet, and like her sleuth, Byerrum can often be found attired in smart 1940s vintage clothing.  Sunday’s sessions included the increasingly popular paranormal subgenre (“Psychic Cats, Angels, and Bats: Books That Put the Ooh in Woo Woo”) and unlikely characters (“Grannies with Guns and Trash-Talking Nuns: Characters Who Defy Stereotypes”).  Anglophiles who hadn’t gotten enough flavor from the royal wedding could attend “Tea, Scones, and Death: Murder in the English Countryside,” as well as the Agatha Tea that closes Malice Domestic each year (and features some splendid hats). 

Attendees could buy all of the authors’ books and get them signed between panels.  Among the dealers this year was Novel Places, opening a shop in June 2011 in Clarksburg, Md.

Bethesda residents Mary Nelson and Sandi Wilson have been coming to Malice on and off for nearly 10 years.  Both became involved because of their mentor Noreen Wald (who writes mysteries under the crafty pseudonym Nora Charles) since when she was their teacher at the .  Nelson and Wilson both had stories published in the second Chesapeake Crimes anthology.  Wilson says that the published book authors at Malice “give me hope if they can do it maybe I can, too,” adding, “Sue Grafton held my hand for 30 seconds and I’m never going to wash that hand again!”