Roz Watkins: The IP Lawyer Turns Mystery Novelist @Ipkat

The IPKat @Ipkat notes the publication of IP attorney turned crime novelist Roz Watkins' novel The Devil's Dice (HarperCollins).

Here's a description of the book's contents.

Detective Inspector Meg Dalton has recently returned to her Peak District roots to pick up the pieces after a breakdown, when a man's body is discovered in a cave. The man's initials and a figure of the Grim Reaper are carved into the cave wall behind his corpse, but bizarrely, the carvings have existed for over one hundred years. The locals talk about a mysterious family curse that started in the times of the witch trials, and Meg finds it increasingly hard to know who to trust. Even her own mother may be implicated. Meg finds her own life at risk as she fights to stop the murderer from killing again. The Literary Review described 'The Devil's Dice' as a 'smart, enjoyable debut', saying that "the setting is dramatic, the characters are convincing and the motive for murder, when eventually uncovered, is interesting."

 

More about Ms. Watkins here.

Would you like to read more mystery or crime fiction featuring IP lawyers? Try out Paul Goldstein's  Errors and Omissions (Random House, 2007),  Havana Requiem (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2012), and  A Patent Lie (Random House, 2008).

The Campus Mystery Novel: Try One! @hbll

Courtesy of Brigham Young University Library, a lovely annotated bibliography of the campus mystery novel from 1920 to 2000.  Maybe I'll start with the intriguing but gory-sounding Off With Her Head by the Coles (1938) or Aaron Marc Stein's The Case of the Absent-Minded Professor (1943) or Scott Keech's Ciphered (1980). 

CFP: John Grisham and the Law: The University of Memphis Law Review @uofmemphis

From the Mailbox: Via Andrew J. McClurg, University of Memphis School of Law:

CALL FOR PAPERS:  JOHN GRISHAM AND THE LAW

Rudy Baylor, a Memphis Law graduate, lost his new associate job before it even started when a bigger firm bought the firm that had hired him as a 3L.  Defeated, yet still determined to pursue a career in the law, Baylor accepted an associate job at an ambulance-chaser firm.  Little did young Baylor know that he would soon find himself litigating against a white-shoe law firm representing a health insurance monolith in an insurance claim—his very first case—that wound up being worth $50 million.

Of course, none of this actually happened in real life.  Twenty years ago, this tale unfolded on the silver screen in the 1997 major motion picture The Rainmaker, which brought to life author John Grisham’s novel of the same name.

We hope you will join us in celebrating John Grisham’s contributions to the law by submitting your articles on legal topics that arise in Grisham’s stories to The University of Memphis Law Review.  An ideal submission will frame its content with specific reference(s) to Grisham’s work(s) and will offer a practical legal argument.  We aim to publish accepted manuscripts in Volume 48, Number 3 of The University of Memphis Law Review.

John Grisham has repeatedly found ways to use his novels to offer incisive commentary on our profession and has popularized timeless themes of law and justice for the masses, in the South and elsewhere.  Topics could include, but are not limited to:

The Runaway Jury

·         Voir dire / jury tampering

·         Settlements and arbitration

·         Collateral estoppel

The Chamber

·         Death penalty and politics

·         Working with hostile clients

·         Ethical considerations when representing members of the same family

A Time to Kill

·         Race and the law

·         Law in the South

·         Vigilante justice

·         Hate crimes

·         Advocacy techniques

·         Right to a fair trial (venue, voir dire)

·         Capital punishment

The Client

·         Fifth Amendment issues

·         Witness-protection program

·         Attorney-client privilege

The Firm

·         Mail fraud

·         Moral obligations when you know your client is guilty

·         Moral and professional conflicts arising for junior associates

·         Balancing the obligation to maintain clients’ confidentiality with the obligation to comply with law enforcement’s demands

The Rainmaker

·         Attorney-client relationships

·         Self-defense justifications

·         Refusal to pay insurance claims

·         Punitive damages

·         Tort reform

Submission Protocol

To submit an entry to this themed book, please submit directly to Maggie McGowan, Senior Articles Editor at memphislawarticles@gmail.com with “Grisham Book” in the subject line.

Poisoned Pen/British Library Bringing Back Many Golden Age Titles @PPPress @britishlibrary

If you like Golden Age mysteries and detective fiction, or works published in English prior to that period, check out the reprints published in the series British Library Crime Classics from Poisoned Pen Press and the British Library. This wonderful collection brings back famous works (think about those by Freeman Wills Crofts) and lesser known works that were still popular in their day and that are unjustly forgotten. There are pathbreakers (Andrew Forrester's The Female Detective from 1864) and collections of short stories (Continental Crimes, edited by Martin Edwards, who contributes both editing and introductions to a number of books in the series), as well as resurrections of the works of authors such as Lois Austen-Leigh, a collateral relative of Jane Austen.

Martin Edwards, who is well known for his own mystery novels, is also the author of The Story of Classic Crime in 100 Books, from Poisoned Pen.



Reasonable prices. Many of the titles are available in ebook format.

Death By Arsenic

Kathryn Harkup writes about Chilean arsenic eaters and the plot of Dorothy Sayers's mystery novel Strong Poison here, for the Science section of The Guardian.

Why Mysteries Haunt Us

David Gramm, via the Arts & Letters Daily, on the enduring qualities of the best mystery and detective stories. Says Mr. Gramm,

The most profound and haunting detective stories are, ultimately, not about the tidy solving of a mystery. This week’s New Yorker story, “The Avenger,” by Patrick Radden Keefe, is a powerful illustration. The story traces the quest by Ken Dornstein to solve the case of the Lockerbie terrorist bombing, which killed all 259 passengers aboard Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988, and 11 people on the ground in Scotland. One of the passengers was Dorstein’s older brother, David.

I would tend to agree. What grips us about mystery and detective writing is the passion of the protagonist who seeks justice, whether inside or outside the legal system. When law and justice align, that is the best of both worlds, but we know that all too often law and justice do not align. So the protagonist must choose whether to be satisfied with law by itself, or to seek justice alone--sometimes truly alone. These are the stories that haunt us.

Death of P. D. James

Acclaimed British novelist  P. D. James has died, her publisher Faber & Faber has announced on its website.  She was 94. Her novels about police officer Adam Dalgleish, the first published in 1964,  transformed British crime fiction. She was made a life peer in 1991.  More about Baroness James here from CNN. 

His Final Bow

PBS will begin airing the last season's adaptations of Agatha Christie's Poirot novels on July 27. After a quarter of a century, we will say adieu to our old friends Poirot, Hastings, Miss Lemon, and Superintendent Japp. While PBS will not offer the final episode, "Curtain," in which Poirot solves the ultimate case of his career, you can see it as well as all the others at acorn.tv (subscription required). The episodes will be released on DVD later this year.

How Mystery-Novel Savvy Are You?

Take this Buzzfeed quiz to see your Classic Mystery Novel Lovers quotient. Mine is Rookie Detective (my score was 59 novels of 99, and no, I'm not revealing which novels I've read).

Most of the choices are fairly modern publications, by U.S. and U.K. authors, with some obvious exceptions (Umberto Eco, Stieg Larsson, Dostoyevsky). If you had to make up your own, international, list of classic mystery novels, which ones would be on your list? Edgar Allan Poe's collection Tales of Mystery and Imagination?  (which is on the Buzzfeed list)? Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment (which is also on the list)? A Simenon novel? Voltaire's Zadig? A Judge Dee novel by Robert van Gulik? Something by Qiu Xiaolong?

Check out other lists here provided by LibraryThing, including the UK Crime Writers' Association Top 100, H.R.F. Keating's Top 100 picks, and Julian Symons' choices. 

Rediscovering Crime Fiction of the Golden Age

Nice blog here, called the Passing Tramp, devoted to mystery and crime fiction, particularly of the Golden Age, with many illustrations. The author is Curtis Evans, who has written numerous books on crime fiction and detective stories, including Masters of the "Humdrum" Mystery (2012) and the forthcoming Mysteries Unlocked: Essays in Honor of Douglas G. Greene (2014).  If you like Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and John Dickson Carr, let Mr. Evans introduce you (or re-introduce you) to their colleagues.

Here's an interview with Mr. Evans, posted at the Past Offences Blog (itself also a worthwhile "virtual" destination).