2025 CWA Dagger Awards Announced

The 2025 winners of the prestigious Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) Dagger Awards, which honour the very best in the crime-writing genre, have been announced.

Created in 1955, the world-famous CWA Daggers are the oldest awards in the genre and have been synonymous with quality crime writing for over half a century.

The awards were announced this evening 3^rd July 2025 at the CWA gala dinner at De Vere Grand Connaught Rooms, London.

The prestigious KAA Gold Dagger, sponsored by Kevin Anderson & Associates, which is awarded for the best crime novel of the year, went to Anna Mazzola for Book of Secrets.

Inspired by real events, prosecutor Stefano Bracchi investigates why men are dying in unnatural numbers months after the plague has ravaged Rome. Judges praised it as an expertly crafted ‘engrossing cat-and-mouse thriller’ set in 17th century Rome.

The Ian Fleming Steel Dagger, sponsored by Ian Fleming Publications Ltd, showcases the thriller of the year and was awarded to Lou Berney for his masterful thriller, Dark Ride, where an unlikely hero goes up against a deadly crime boss. Judges praised it as ‘sublime thriller full of heartache and humanity’ and a ‘moving yet nail-biting novel.’

The much-anticipated ILP John Creasey First Novel Dagger which highlights the best debut novels of the year went to Katy Massey’s debut set in the shadow of the Yorkshire Ripper, All Us Sinners. Judges praised it as ‘vivid and brutally honest’ and an ‘important and bold take on the Yorkshire Ripper murders told with passion and respect from the point of view of the women who were never heard.’

The Historical Dagger, sponsored by Morgan Witzel in memory of Dr Marilyn Livingstone, went to A.J. West with The Betrayal of Thomas True which is set in the excitement and squalor of London’s underworld in the year 1710.

Nadine Matheson, Chair of the CWA, said: "This has been another exemplary year, and our judges once again faced the exciting but difficult task of selecting from a truly impressive shortlist. The winners reflect the strength, diversity, and continuing legacy of crime writing today.

“I would also like to extend our congratulations to the winners of the Twisted Dagger and the Whodunnit Dagger, Tracy Sierra and Lisa Hall. The inclusion of these two new categories continues to highlight the evolution and innovation happening within the genre.”

The Crime Fiction in Translation Dagger, sponsored in honour of Dolores Jakubowski, was awarded to the debut gangland thriller The Night of Baba Yaga from Japan’s Akira Otani translated by Sam Bett – hot-on-the-heels from winning the 2025 CrimeFest Specsavers Debut Crime Novel of the Year.

Judges said: “Like a manga cartoon, this savage depiction of Japanese yakuza life is relentlessly violent if only to highlight the deep humanity of its fish out of water characters. Mean and lean, this saga sparkles with originality and delivers a splendid if bizarre love story.” 

The Night of Baba Yaga pipped another Japanese bestseller to the post, Asako Yuzuki’s Butter translated by Polly Barton.

The ALCS Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction was awarded to Kate Summerscale’s retelling of the Christie murders, The Peepshow: The Murders at 10 Rillington Place. It was praised as a ‘remarkable read, riveting without ever being salacious’ offering a fresh perspective on one of Britain’s most notorious cases.

The CWA Daggers are one of the few high-profile awards that honour the short story. This year Short Story Dagger went to the academic and expert on Agatha Christie, J.C Bernthal, for A Date on Yarmouth Pier, praised as a ‘mini-masterpiece with a killer twist.’

2025 saw the announcement of two new CWA Dagger Awards.

The Twisted Dagger celebrates psychological thrillers and dark and twisty tales that often feature unreliable narrators, disturbed emotions, a healthy dose of moral ambiguity, and a sting in the tail. 

It was awarded to Nightwatching by Tracy Sierra, a slow-burning tale of a mother who will do anything to protect her children. The books unusual voice captured the judges, who praised it as, ‘horrific, compelling, nerve-shreddingly tense and cleverly twisted.’

The Whodunnit Dagger celebrates books that focus on the intellectual challenge at the heart of a good mystery. Books in this category include cosy crime, traditional crime, and Golden Age-inspired mysteries.

The inaugural winner is Lisa Hall with The Case of the Singer and the Showgirl. Judges admired its cleverly handled twist on a classic mystery featuring Hollywood icons: ‘A glamorous, evocative timeslip mystery that took us right back to sparkling Vegas in the fifties.’ 

The Emerging Author Dagger, which has been going for over 20 years, celebrates aspiring crime novelists, sponsored by Fiction Feedback. The competition is open to unpublished authors, and is judged on the best opening for an unpublished crime novel. Over two dozen past winners and shortlisted Debut Dagger authors have signed publishing deals to date.

2025’s Emerging Author Dagger was awarded to Joe Eurell for Ashland. Judges compared it as Mare of Easttown meets We Begin at the End: “A beautifully written story evoking a powerful sense of place and conveying a rare energy. Rounded characters are portrayed in fascinating depth.” 

Richard Osman was awarded the 2025 Dagger in the Library award. The nominee longlist is voted by librarians and library users, chosen for the author’s body of work and support of libraries. 

Best Crime and Mystery Publisher of the Year Dagger, which celebrates publishers and imprints demonstrating excellence and diversity in crime writing, was awarded to Orenda Books. 

The CWA Diamond Dagger, awarded to an author whose crime-writing career has been marked by sustained excellence, is announced in early spring and in 2025 was awarded to Mick Herron.

Mick Herron said: “I’ve spent the best part of my life – not the majority of it; just the best part – in the crime writers’ community, and to receive this accolade from these friends and colleagues is both a career highlight and a personal joy. I’m touched and thrilled beyond measure, and will try to live up to the honour.”

The 2025 Winners in Full:

The KAA GOLD DAGGER

Book of Secrets by Anna Mazzola: (Orion)

THE IAN FLEMING STEEL DAGGER

Dark Ride by Lou Berney (Hemlock Press/ HarperCollins)

THE ILP JOHN CREASEY FIRST NOVEL DAGGER

All Us Sinners by Katy Massey (Little, Brown /Sphere)

THE TWISTED DAGGER

Nightwatching by Tracy Sierra (PRH/ Viking)

THE WHODUNNIT DAGGER

The Case of the Singer and the Showgirl by Lisa Hall (Hera)

THE HISTORICAL DAGGER (Sponsored in Honour of Dr. Marilyn Livingstone)

The Betrayal of Thomas True by A.J. West, (Orenda Books)

 THE ALCS GOLD DAGGER FOR NON-FICTION

The Peepshow: The Murders at 10 Rillington Place by Kate Summerscale: (Bloomsbury Circus)   

THE CRIME FICTION IN TRANSLATION DAGGER (Sponsored in Honour of Dolores Jakubowski)

The Night of Baba Yaga by Akira Otani:  (Faber) tr. Sam Bett

THE SHORT STORY DAGGER

‘A Date on Yarmouth Pier’ by J.C Bernthal in Midsummer Mysteries edited by Martin Edwards (Flame Tree Publishing/Flame Tree Collections)

THE DAGGER IN THE LIBRARY

Richard Osman

THE DAGGER FOR THE BEST CRIME AND MYSTERY PUBLISHERS

Orenda Books

THE EMERGING AUTHOR DAGGER (sponsored by Fiction Feedback)

Ashland by Joe Eurell, 

 THE CWA DIAMOND DAGGER AWARD

 Mick Herron

Japanese Maltese Falcon Award

Congratulations go to S.J. ROZAN who won the Japanese Maltese Falcon Award for Paper Son. The award is given by the members of the Maltese Falcon Society of Japan for the best hardboiled novel published in Japan. Paper Son came out in 2019 in the U.S., but came out in Japan in 2022. 

Maltese Falcon Award: Japan

 

The Maltese Falcon Society of Japan have announced that C.J. Box is the winner of the 2021 Maltese Falcon Award with his novel Breaking Point (Putnam, 2013) as the best hardboiled/private eye novel published in Japan in the previous year. 

C.J. Box will receive a wood-crafted Falcon statuette.

Hat-tip to the Gumshoe website for the news.

Falcon Award Winner

Congratulations to Don Winslow who has won the 2019 Falcon Award for The Force (Morrow/ HarperCollins 2017) from the Maltese Falcon Society Japan. He has now won five Falcon Awards following Missing: New York (2016) (no English version), The Winter of Frankie Machine(2011) , The Power of the Dog(2010), and A Cool Breeze on the Underground(1994).

The Falcon is given out by the Maltese Falcon Society of Japan to “the best hard-boiled/private eye novel published in Japan in the previous year.”

The previous Falcon Award winners include Roger Hobbs, S.J. Rozan, Michael Connelly, George Pelecanos, Lawrence Block, Sue Grafton, Michael Z. Lewin, Joe Gores, James Crumley, and Robert B. Parker.

Hat tip Mystery Fanfareand The Gumshoe Site

In Memoriam James Melville

James Melville (aka Roy Peter Martin and Hampton Charles)

January 5^th 1931 - 20th March 2014

It is with deep sadness that Shots reports the death of Roy Peter Martin, better known to crime fiction fans as James Melville and Hampton Charles, who passed on 23rd March, aged 83, only weeks before his most famous crime series, the novel featuring Japanese policeman Superintendent Otani, was to be brought back into print by Ostara Crime, after a gap of more than thirty years.

Roy Peter Martin was born in London in 1931.  He read philosophy at Birkbeck College and after National Service in the RAF worked in local government and then entered teaching.  In 1960 he became a British Council Officer and thereafter his career was in cultural diplomacy and educational development in Indonesia, Japan and Hungary.  In 1979 he returned to Japan as Head of the British Council and began to write the Superintendent Otani series of crime novels which “provided a vivid and multi-stranded portrait of Japanese society, caught between its traditional (and often hidebound) past and the exigencies of modern life”.  He also wrote historical novels set in Japan and spy novels which drew on his experiences in Indonesia and Hungary.

Under the pen name Hampton Charles, he continued the ‘Miss Seeton’ series of stories (gentle parodies of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple books) originally written by Heron

Carvic (1913-1980).  He was also a noted reviewer of crime fiction for the Hampstead & Highgate Express and a member of the Detection Club.

Series editor for Ostara Crime, Mike Ripley, writes: ‘I knew James/Peter primarily as a reviewer and in particular a very generous reviewer of my own early novels.  After a gap of twenty or so years, I found myself in a position to bring his excellent Japanese mysteries back into print and James/Peter seemed delighted at the prospect.  It is truly depressing that he was not to live to see his books back in print – and as eBooks for the very first time.  He was a gentle reviewer and a fine writer who used his extensive experience of Japan to shed light on Japanese culture and society by showing how the Japanese dealt with foreigners and all things foreign.  That was a difficult trick, but James Melville pulled it off.’

Ostara Publishing are to release new Ostara Crime editions of James Melville’s first three ‘Otani’ novels: The Wages of Zen, The Chrysanthemum Chain and A Sort of Samurai.  Further details on: www.ostarapublishing.co.uk.

Why is Sex Still a Crime?

Today’s guest blog is by Susanna Quinn whose debut novel Glass Geisha’s is published today.  Glass Geisha’s is the tale of Steph who comes to Japan to work as a bar hostess but finds herself involved in something much deeper and darker.

Let me take you into Tokyo’s red-light district, where women are waiting to massage you with their naked bodies.  Walk amid prostitutes in school uniforms and nurse outfits, and wander into fake subway stations where men pay to ‘molest’ women.  Buy a cup of coffee from a waitress wearing no knickers, and then pay her for sex at the back of the cafe.

What else will you find, amid all this weird and wonderful sex for sale?  Crime.  Not just petty theft or vandalism, but hard, violent crime.  Drug wars, violent robbery and murder.

Gangsters run Tokyo’s sex district and make money from the girls – just as they do in every other big city all over the world.  They sell the girls drugs, beat them when they misbehave and make sure it’s near impossible for them to go back to a normal life.

Sex and crime have always gone together – in books and in real life.  Where there is sex for sale, there is violence, theft and murder.  Moreover, all of these things fascinate us.

Here is what I don’t understand.  Sex is supposed to be a pleasant, relaxing act, so why is selling it often connected with the very worst sorts of criminals?  I’m talking about people who will, without remorse, shoot someone in the head and throw their body in front of a subway train.

The prostitutes I met in Tokyo were often drug addicts, and almost always had violent, gangster boyfriends who beat them.  Why did they associate with the very worst sorts of criminals, when their only crime was making men happy for half an hour, and charging for the privilege?

Is it because, deep down, we still think sex is dirty and wrong?  The girls who sell sex feel so bad about themselves, they believe they’re as bad as men who murder and torture others?  Sure, selling sex is against the law in most places.  But so is banking fraud.  That doesn’t mean it has to be associated with violent crime.

I didn’t start out to write a crime novel, and in fact, Glass Geishas doesn’t have a detective or a conventional crime plot.  I worked in the Tokyo sex district as a hostess for many years, and had so many frightening and exciting experiences; I felt they’d be a good basis for a frightening and exciting book.

Let me quickly explain what a hostess is.  A hostess is a sort of modern-day geisha, and western hostesses are in high demand.  They pour men’s drinks, offer flirtatious conversation and sing karaoke.  That’s it – supposedly.  But hostess clubs are almost always in sex districts and, truth be told, some hostesses do end up having sex with their customers.

I wanted to write about a British girl working as a hostess in the Tokyo sex district, and after wrangling with many different storylines, they all came back to one thing.  Crime.  That’s what I saw in the sex district, and I always wanted to write the truth.

While I worked in Japan as a hostess, I was offered a lot of money to have sex with men.  Around £10,000 for an hour, to be precise.  That offer forced me to think about my own attitudes to selling sex, and what on earth my problem was.  After all, why was it different to singing karaoke with someone you didn’t like, or having a boring conversation about digital cameras for three hours?  I could earn three month’s wages in half an hour – so why couldn’t I go through with it?

The answer was societal disapproval.  If I had sex with someone for money, I’d always be carrying a sort of ‘shame’ that I’d done something most people saw as really wrong.

But why?  Where’s the shame?  Is it any different from giving someone a massage, or bathing someone who can’t bath themselves?  In terms of the impact it has on people, prostitution isn’t half as bad as being a loan shark or a millionaire tax dodger.  Who does it hurt?

One of the worst things you could ever say about a woman is that she had sex with someone for money.  Selling sex is apparently so awful that you can be sent to prison for it.  But it wasn’t prison that bothered me.  It was the fact that for my whole life I’d be tarnished by society – seen as a certain sort of girl.

Japan actually has quite a laid-back attitude to sex.  It’s not seen as dirty or embarrassing.  It’s generally accepted that people will have their fetishes, which may involve – say – schoolgirls or molesting women on subway trains, and as long as no one is hurt we should live and let live.

However, girls working in the sex industry are still frowned upon.  Nice girls don’t work in the mizu shobai (the water trade – the Japanese term for the nightclub industry).  Just like the rest of the world, there are the girls you marry, and the girls you don’t.  Selling sex for money makes you a girl no one would ever marry.

When I worked in Japan, I saw ‘nice’ girls make the transition from hostess to prostitute.  They did it because after years of working in the Tokyo night scene, they were alcoholics or addicted to coke and saw no other way of earning a living.

Once they made the cross over, they became part of the criminal underworld – a world where it’s always nighttime, and money seems to grow on the fluorescent-lit buildings that climb into dark, polluted skies.  One minute you have a million yen in your pocket, the next you’ve spent it all on champagne, cocaine and designer labels and you feel worthless again.

Life is cheap, and people don’t live long.  I never met a girl who chose to be part of this world – they were always sucked or dragged into it.  Sleep with someone for money once, and society sees you as cheap and worthless forever.  When the world sees you as worthless, it doesn’t take long to think of yourself that way, and that’s the ultimate trap.

Why is selling sex still a crime?  I truly have no idea.  What I do know is that our attitude to prostitutes – the fact we think of them as slightly less than human – ruins lives, and perhaps that’s the biggest crime of all.

Glass Geishas is published as a paperback original and eBook by Hodder & Stoughton on the 7^th June 2012, £7.99

More information about Susanna Quinn can be found at her website www.bookgroupbooks.com