Batten says farewell

The Whodunit file is closed.

Jack Batten, the Toronto Star’s long-time crime fiction reviewer, has typed -30- after his final Whodunit column. After nearly 24 years of reviewing crime novels for the newspaper, he bade his readers goodbye today.

During those 24 years, Jack has been a pillar of the Canadian crime fiction community. As well as writing hundreds of review columns, he’s penned seven of his own crime fiction novels—his Crang mystery Straight No Chaser was a finalist for the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Crime Novel in 1990—and dozens of non-fiction books. He has also been accessible to crime writers and readers, speaking at mystery conferences, Sisters in Crime meetings, and other events.

My greatest thrills of the past decade were Jack’s reviews of my four Pat Tierney mysteries. I walked on clouds for days after they appeared in the Star.

He was also supportive of the Mesdames of Mayhem, the collective of Canadian crime writers that compiled five short fiction anthologies in recent years.

Thank you, Jack! We wish you more successes in your coming adventures. And we hope that our paths will cross again.

Murder we wrote!

Fabulous article in the Toronto Star Saturday October 29 about the Mesdames of Mayhem, my crime fiction collective. Check it out here.

And looking forward to the Mesdames' Zoom launch next Sunday Nov. 13.

Effective opening pages

Returned home from two weeks in Tuscany to the huge thrill of seeing my essay on Art Taylor’s blog, The First Two Pages!

One of America’s leading short-story writers, Art Taylor has reaped a host of awards: an Edgar in 2019; an Anthony in 2015, Agatha awards in 2014, 2015 and 2017; Macavity awards in 2014 and 2017; and three Derringer awards. He’s also a book critic, and associate professor of English at George Mason University in Virginia.

Art took over B.K. Stevens’ outstanding weekly blog, The First Two Pages, after her death in August 2017. The blog features craft essays by writers, analyzing the opening pages of their published stories and novels.

For the past two weeks, Art has posted essays on stories that are included in the Mesdames of Mayhem’s new anthology, In the Spirit of 13. Lisa de Nikolits’ essay on “In a Land of Fear and Denial” ran on Sept. 27.

My thoughts on the opening pages of “The Fur Coat Conundrum,” ran this past Tuesday, Oct. 4. The story was inspired by my adventures at newspapers across Canada.

And M.H. Callway’s essay on “Amdur’s Ghost” will appear on Oct. 11.

As Art notes in his Guidelines for writers preparing posts for The First Two Pages, effective opening pages are what make busy literary agents and acquisition editors keep reading submissions.

Art Taylor is a leading American short-story writer.