C.C. Benison lands deal for U.K. thriller

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/08/2021 (1854 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

German mystery fans have obviously taken a shine to a series by Winnipeg mystery writer Doug Whiteway — who publishes under the name C.C. Benison — featuring a British monarch as sleuth.

Whiteway’s agent announced the sale of Death at Windsor Castle this month to German publisher Bastei Lubbe. The publisher earlier bought rights to the first two books in the series: Death at Buckingham Palace and Death at Sandringham House, with the former published this spring.

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Attention, writers: looking to convert your unpublished work into quick cash and, in all probability, help some organized crime group launder ill-gotten gains?

Turn your manuscript into a non-fungible token!

NFTs are electronically traded assets that became big news this spring when an NFT by a digital artist known as Beeple sold at auction for US$69 million.

A story on the website Lithub focuses on several literary NFTs, including one by American author Blake Butler, who turned his “virtually unpublishable” 2008 novel Decade into an NFT that sold for US$7,569 worth of the cryptocurrency ethereum (worth almost $13,000 by mid-August). Not exactly Beeple territory, but more than the average novel earns its creator.

The full story is available at wfp.to/nftbook.

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Winnipeg writer/teacher Colleen Nelson and librarian Kathie MacIsaac, the children’s librarian at the Headingley library, have teamed up to connect readers of middle-grade books with their authors in a monthly online book club.

MG Lit Online Book Club events are held on the last Thursday of each month and have featured writers including Kenneth Oppel, Martha Skrypuch, David A. Robertson and Terry Lynn Johnson. Nelson and MacIsaac started the book club to help young readers stay connected with books during the pandemic.

The club continues Sept. 30 with Uganda-born, British- and Canadian-raised Tina Athaide discussing her novel Orange for the Sunset, set during the expulsion of the country’s Indian community during Idi Amin’s dictatorship in the 1970s. Oct. 28 brings Deborah Kerbel, discussing her novel Like a Duck, a Winnipeg Free Press Summer Reading Challenge selection for this year.

For more information, see wfp.to/kidbookclub.

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Writer and activist Clayton Thomas-Muller discusses his memoir Life in the City of Dirty Water on Tuesday in an online event hosted by Penguin Random House Canada and McNally Robinson Booksellers.

Thomas-Muller, a member of Mathias Colomb Cree Nation at Pukatawagan, has campaigned internationally for greenhouse gas reductions and protection of water for more than 20 years, and has led Indigenous delegations in speaking at United Nations Earth Summits in Johannesburg and Rio de Janeiro, as well as lobbying in Ottawa, Washington, D.C., and the European Union capital in Brussels.

To register for the event, see wfp.to/clayton.

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Winnipeg-born, Toronto-based author David Demchuk, who won the Shirley Jackson and Sunburst awards for his 2017 horror novel The Bone Mother, explores horror in the context of the 2010-17 string of murders in Toronto’s Gay Village in his new novel Red X.

He discusses the new novel Wednesday at 7 p.m. in an online event hosted by his publisher, Strange Light, and McNally Robinson Booksellers.

Demchuk’s own passion for horror is woven into the story, in which a hunted community and haunted author confront an ageless evil.

To register for the online event, see wfp.to/demchuk.

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Ted Cruz, the senator from Texas who came second to Donald Trump in the 2016 Republican primary process, appears to be No. 1 when it comes to scamming bestseller lists.

Forbes magazine reports that Cruz’s senatorial campaign has disclosed it spent US$150,000 on online orders for books last fall, just after Cruz published his book One Vote Away: How a Single Supreme Court Seat Can Change History.

The Cruz campaign refused to say if the books it bought were Cruz’s, but bulk ordering of political tomes is a common practice in U.S. politics. Forbes reports that campaigns for senators Elizabeth Warren, Tom Cotton and Tammy Duckworth bought copies of their books in bulk, though for totals of $20,000 or less.

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