MURDER MOST GROTESQUE Has Been Nominated for an Agatha Award!

MURDER MOST GROTESQUE Has Been Nominated for an Agatha Award!

I am grateful to share that my book MURDER MOST GROTESQUE: THE COMEDIC CRIME FICTION OF JOYCE PORTER has been nominated for an Agatha Award from Malice Domestic in the best Nonfiction category! I'd like to thank everybody who nominated me, and I also want to congratulate all of the other nominees, especially the other Level Best authors and the other Nonfiction nominees: Jan Brogan, Julie Kavanaugh, Lee Child, and Laurie R. King! Further gratitude must be extended to my publishers at Level Best Books, Shawn Reilly Simmons, Verena Rose, and Harriette Sackler! Thank you all so much!

 

Here is the list of this year’s nominees!

 

​The 2021 Agatha Award Nominees

Best Contemporary Novel
Cajun Kiss of Death by Ellen Byron (Crooked Lane Books)
Watch Her by Edwin Hill (Kensington)
The Madness of Crowds by Louise Penny (Minotaur)
Her Perfect Life by Hank Phillippi Ryan (Forge)
Symphony Road by Gabriel Valjan (Level Best Books)

Best Historical Novel
Murder at Mallowan Hall by Colleen Cambridge (Kensington)
Clark and Division by Naomi Hirahara (Soho Crime)
The Bombay Prince by Sujata Massey (Soho Crime)
Death at Greenway by Lori Rader-Day (HarperCollins)
The Devil's Music by Gabriel Valjan (Winter Goose Publishing)

Best First Novel
The Turncoat's Widow by Mally Becker (Level Best Books)
A Dead Man's Eyes by Lori Duffy Foster (Level Best Books)
Arsenic and Adobo by Mia P. Manansala (Berkley)
Murder in the Master by Judy L. Murray (Level Best Books)
Mango, Mambo, and Murder by Raquel V. Reyes (Crooked Lane Books)

Best Short Story
"A Family Matter" by Barb Goffman (Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine Jan/Feb 2021)
"A Tale of Two Sisters" by Barb Goffman in Murder on the Beach (Destination Murders)
"Doc's at Midnight" by Richie Narvaez in Midnight Hour (Crooked Lane Books)
"The Locked Room Library" by Gigi Pandian (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine July/Aug 2021)
"Bay of Reckoning" by Shawn Reilly Simmons in Murder on the Beach (Destination Murders)

Best Non-Fiction
The Combat Zone: Murder, Race, and Boston's Struggle for Justice by Jan Brogan (Bright Leaf Press)
Murder Most Grotesque: The Comedic Crime Fiction of Joyce Porter by Chris Chan (Level Best Books)
The Irish Assassins: Conspiracy, Revenge, and the Phoenix Park Murders that Stunned Victorian England by Julie Kavanaugh (Atlantic Monthly Press)
How to Write a Mystery: A Handbook from Mystery Writers of America by MWA with editors Lee Child and Laurie R. King (Simon & Schuster)

Best Children's/YA Mystery
​Cold-Blooded Myrtle by Elizabeth C. Bunce (Algonquin Young Readers)
The Forest of Stolen Girls by June Hur (Fiewel and Friends/Macmillan)
I Play One on TV by Alan Orloff (Down & Out Books)
Leisha's Song by Lynn Slaughter (Fire and Ice/Melange Books)
Enola Holmes and the Black Barouche by Nancy Springer (Wednesday Books)

 

 

 

–Chris Chan

 

 

Chris Chan’s first novel, Sherlock’s Secretary, was released on November 3^rd.  His book Murder Most Grotesque: The Comedic Crime Fiction of Joyce Porter was published by Level Best Books on September 7^th.  His first non-fiction book, Sherlock & Irene: The Secret Truth Behind “A Scandal in Bohemia” is available for sale at Amazon.com and the MX Publishing website, as well as at Book Depository (with free worldwide shipping there).  It is also available in a Kindle  edition.

Sherlock Holmes: Adventures Through The Multiverse

Sherlock Holmes: Adventures Through The Multiverse

 

Over the last few years, I’ve published several stories in anthologies by Belanger Books, and their upcoming project is a bit different.  It’s called Sherlock Holmes: Adventures Through The Multiverse, and it features a world that’s not the same as the one readers generally know.

 

Belanger Books describes the two-volume set, saying:

 

Imagine Sherlock Holmes, sitting in his chair at 221B Baker Street, his pipe in hand, pontificating to Watson about the facts of a case. Now imagine that same Holmes but different. That traditional Sherlock Holmes is now spread across the multiverse and while he is still the same brilliant man, he is:

·        in the American Wild West, 

·       a Native American in prehistoric Earth

·       a masked vigilante fighting crime at night in the streets of London

·        an ingenious villain fighting against Moriarty, the hero

·       a woman

·       a robot 

·       in a version of the Twilight Zone

 All of these Sherlock Holmes and more are featured in a two volume set: Sherlock Holmes: Adventures through The Multiverse! The authors have done a phenomenal job creating an alternative version of Sherlock Holmes but keeping the spirit of Holmes alive.

To find out more and to back their Kickstarter campaign, please go here.  My story, "The Prisoners of Cawdor College," takes a look at what might have happened in Moriarty had triumphed over Holmes at Reichenbach Falls.

 

–Chris Chan

 

 

Chris Chan’s first novel, Sherlock’s Secretary, was released on November 3^rd.  His book Murder Most Grotesque: The Comedic Crime Fiction of Joyce Porter was published by Level Best Books on September 7^th.  His first non-fiction book, Sherlock & Irene: The Secret Truth Behind “A Scandal in Bohemia” is available for sale at Amazon.com and the MX Publishing website, as well as at Book Depository (with free worldwide shipping there).  It is also available in a Kindle edition.

What Makes A Story “Stick” With You?

What Makes A Story “Stick” With You?

 

I read a lot, and I have an excellent memory.  The books I tend to remember best are the ones I enjoy.  Yet there are a lot of mediocre books out there, and in some ways, there are some books that fail in a different way from the truly awful.  The worst books haunt my memory with how terrible they are.  The truly forgettable books are utter nonentities in my mind.

 

How bland does a book have to be to fade from your mind moments after reading it?  Some books are so vapid I have to keep doubling back and rereading the last five pages because even though I read closely, I can’t recall what happened.  It’s like some authors have an amnesia curse placed upon their prose– they’re so forgettable.

 

There are a bunch of reasons for this.  Cookie-cutter plots.  Generic characters.  One cliché after another.  Meandering plots.  Often, a major problem is the prose style– some writers are utterly flat, others are trying to be artistic and have merely puréed their words into pap.  No humor.  No suspense.  Nobody who’s likeable or hateable.  Dialogue that neither resonates nor entertains.  In any event, these books aren’t really bad, just… zeroes.

 

It’s frustrating to finish a book and realize it had no impact on me whatsoever.  And it happens way more often than I’d like when I try a book from an author with whom I’m not previously familiar.  Has this happened to you?

 

 

 

–Chris Chan

 

 

Chris Chan’s first novel, Sherlock’s Secretary, was released on November 3^rd.  His book Murder Most Grotesque: The Comedic Crime Fiction of Joyce Porter was published by Level Best Books on September 7^th.  His first non-fiction book, Sherlock & Irene: The Secret Truth Behind “A Scandal in Bohemia” is available for sale at Amazon.com and the MX Publishing website, as well as at Book Depository (with free worldwide shipping there).  It is also available in a Kindle edition.

 

The Perils of Bingewatching

The Perils of Bingewatching

 

In my last post, I talked about the difference between watching TV and movies alone vs. with watching with other people.  Truly, community plays a role in how we respond to entertainment.  Now, I want to move on to another issue: bingewatching.  Bingewatching is the practice of watching seasons of television series extremely quickly, essentially watching one episode after another and completing a season in a very short time, sometimes in a single day or at least a weekend.

 

I cast no judgment upon people who bingewatch.  Goodness knows I’ve done my share of it.  And I think the practice works well for action and thriller series, which end on cliffhangers.  Instead of waiting a full week for a new episode, one can find out immediately what happens next.  The problem is diminishing returns.  You can only sit and watch for so long before one’s wits and memory are dulled.  Often, the later at night (or the earlier in the morning) it gets, fatigue may set in and affect one’s enjoyment of the series.  Sometimes you just have to sleep and come back fresh.

 

But while action and thrillers may be made for bingewatching, I have more reservations about comedy.  The problem with comedy is that you can get overloaded, and many comedy shows need to be savored to be enjoyed.  Sometimes being overexposed to a certain style of humor inoculates you against it, so after three or four episodes, one doesn’t laugh as much as one might otherwise.  I have a much higher opinion of the fourth and fifth seasons of Arrested Development than some outspoken critics and fans, and I think by bingewatching these seasons of the series alone, rather than one episode at a time weekly, often in a group, the humor was unfortunately dulled. 

 

Think of the series Seinfeld.  During the 1990’s, my friends and I always looked forward to watching the show on Thursday nights, often with family members.  We always had a topic of conversation of Fridays, discussing the show, and I’m sure that if entire seasons of Seinfeld were released all at once and devoured over a weekend, not only would responses to the humor be blunted, but many of the Seinfeld trademark lines and imagery, from “Yada, Yada, Yada,” to Festivus would never have made their way into the public mindset because it would have been too much, too quickly.  With no time to be absorbed and disseminated, Seinfeld’s mark on popular culture would have been far smaller than it was.

 

So what do you think?  Are there any other problems arising from bingewatching?  I mean, aside from lack of exercise and reading fewer books.

 

 

–Chris Chan

 

 

Chris Chan’s first novel, Sherlock’s Secretary, was released on November 3^rd.  His book Murder Most Grotesque: The Comedic Crime Fiction of Joyce Porter was published by Level Best Books on September 7^th.  His first non-fiction book, Sherlock & Irene: The Secret Truth Behind “A Scandal in Bohemia” is available for sale at Amazon.com and the MX Publishing website, as well as at Book Depository (with free worldwide shipping there).  It is also available in a Kindle  edition.

The Viewing Experience

The Viewing Experience

 

Happy New Year, everybody!

 

Today I want to bring up an issue that I’ve been pondering for a while now: do we respond to watching television shows and movies differently when we watch them alone, as opposed to when we watch them with others?

 

I first started thinking about this phenomenon when talking with friends, and they discussed how they didn’t find The Simpsons as funny as they used to in the past.  Then we watched a couple of recent episodes together, and they laughed a lot.  They didn’t understand it.  I had actually seen the episodes myself earlier, and I didn’t laugh when I first saw them, but I did watching them with my friends.  After a bit of questioning, my friends noted that through middle school through college, they watched the show with family or friends, but as they entered adulthood, they generally watched it alone, and enjoyed the experience less.

 

With The Current Situation going on, a lot of people have been avoiding movie theaters.  There’s a line from Sunset Boulevard where the former star Norma Desmond declares “I’m still big.  It’s the pictures that got small.”  I’ve heard some people finding the movies less enjoyable at home, and wishing they could go back to the theaters.  Others prefer being at home in comfortable chairs, avoiding sticky floors, and being pause the movie whenever they like and use a private restroom.

 

Still, it makes me wonder, how does watching a show by oneself affect the experience compared to watching with friends, or being in a theater with others people reacting to the film?  I’d be interested to hear what people think on this subject.

 

–Chris Chan

 

 

Chris Chan’s first novel, Sherlock’s Secretary, was released on November 3^rd.  His book Murder Most Grotesque: The Comedic Crime Fiction of Joyce Porter was published by Level Best Books on September 7^th.  His first non-fiction book, Sherlock & Irene: The Secret Truth Behind “A Scandal in Bohemia” is available for sale at Amazon.com and the MX Publishing website, as well as at Book Depository (with free worldwide shipping there).  It is also available in a Kindle edition.