The Agatha Award Winners

The Agatha Award Winners were announced at Malice Domestic on Saturday 28 April 2023. 

Best Contemporary Novel

A World of Curiosities by Louise Penny (Minotaur)

Best Historical Novel

Because I Could Not Stop for Death by Amanda Flower (Berkley)

Best First Novel

Cheddar Off Dead by Korina Moss (St. Martin’s)

Best Short Story

"Beauty and the Beyotch," by Barb Goffman (Sherlock Holmes Magazine, Feb. 2022)

Best Non-Fiction 

Promophobia: Taking the Mystery Out of Promoting Crime Fiction by Diane Vallere Ed. (Sisters in Crime)

Best Children's/YA Mystery

Enola Holmes and the Elegant Escapade by Nancy Springer (Wednesday Books)

Congratulations to all winners and nominated authors.

Davitt Awards 2022 Shortlists Announced

 

Sisters in Crime Australia has announced the shortlists for the 2022 Davitt Awards for best crime books by Australian women.

The shortlisted titles in each category are:

Adult Crime Novel 

Unforgiven by Sarah Barrie, (HQ Fiction)

Before You Knew My Name by Jacqueline Bublitz, (A&U)

You Had It Coming by B M Carroll, (Profile Books)

All That I Remember About Dean Cola by Tania Chandler, (Scribe)

Bodies of Light by Jennifer Down, (Text)

Shelter by Catherine Jinks, (Text)

The Beautiful Words by Vanessa McCausland, (HarperCollins)

Once There Were Wolves by Charlotte McConaghy, (Hamish Hamilton)

The Family Doctor by Debra Oswald, (A&U)

The Second Son by Loraine Peck, (Text)

The Silent Listener by Lyn Yeowart, (Viking)

Young Adult Crime Novel

The Gaps by Leanne Hall, (Text)

Dirt Circus League by Maree Kimberley, (Text)

Sugar Town Queens by Malla Nunn, (A&U Children’s)

House of Hollow by Krystal Sutherland, (Penguin)

Children’s Crime Novel

Night Ride into Danger by Jackie French, (HarperCollins)

The Detective’s Guide to Ocean Travel by Nicki Greenberg, (Affirm)

Ella at Eden #6: The London Thief by Laura Sieveking, (Scholastic)

Nonfiction Crime Book

Empowering Women: From Murder and Misogyny to High Court Victory by Susie Allanson with Lizzie O’Shea, (Wilkinson Publishing)

Larrimah: A Missing Man, an Eyeless Croc and an Outback Town of 11 People Who Mostly Hate Each Other by Caroline Graham & Kylie Stevenson, (A&U)

The Winter Road: A Story of Legacy, Land and a Killing at Croppa Creek by Kate Holden, (Black Inc.)

Banquet: The Untold Story of Adelaide’s Family Murders by Debi Marshall, (Vintage)

Debut Crime Books

Before You Knew My Name by Jacqueline Bublitz, (A&U)

Shadow Over Edmund Street by Suzanne Frankham, (Journey to Words)

Larrimah: A Missing Man, an Eyeless Croc and an Outback Town of 11 People Who Mostly Hate Each Other by Caroline Graham & Kylie Stevenson, (A&U)

The Waterhole by Lily Malone, (Lily Malone Publishing)

Unsheltered by Clare Moleta, (Simon &Schuster)

The Family Doctor by Debra Oswald, (A&U)

The Second Son by Loraine Peck, (Text)

Shiver by Allie Reynolds, (Hachette)

Crime Writer by Dime Sheppard, (Ruby Books)

House of Hollow by Krystal Sutherland, (Penguin)

The Silent Listener by Lyn Yeowart, (Viking).

This year’s judging panel was made up of medical autopsy expert Philomena Horsley; YA expert and reviewer Joy Lawn; Sisters in Crime’s president Moraig Kisler; and authors Janice Simpson, Emily Webb and Jacquie Byron. The judges selected the 33 shortlisted titles from a longlist of 169 books.

The six category winners will be announced at a gala dinner in Melbourne on Saturday, 27 August. No prize money is attached to the Davitts; the winner of each category receives a trophy.

Last year’s winners included Sally Hepworth for The Good Sister (Macmillan) and Leah Swann’s Sheerwater (Fourth Estate).

For more information, see the Sisters in Crime website.

Memories of Margaret (Maron) by Mike Ripley

 

Margaret Maron 1938-2021

I first encountered Margaret Maron in 1989 when I naively applied to become an associate member of the Mystery Writers of America (not realising you were expected to be published there to qualify). I must have included some biographical background - at the time I was involved in exporting British beer to the US - as Margaret wrote to me asking if I would mind answering a few technical questions for her husband Joe, a keen (and very talented) home brewer.

It sounded like the beginning of a beautiful friendship, and it was.

When I learned she was due to attend the 1990 Bouchercon in London, I hastened round to Murder One and stocked up on Margaret’s ‘Sigrid Harald’ mysteries, then published here by Headline.

Debuting with One Coffee With in 1982, New York police detective Harald was to feature in nine novels and the series drew praise from veteran British critic Anthony Lejeune as examples of  the ‘cleanly, even classically, drawn detective problem and  neatly turned solution.’ I found they offered not just a good murder mysteries, but interesting character studies as Sigrid, whilst certainly not a strident feminist, was having to make her way in the very male world of police work.

Just as, in fact, Margaret Maron was having to make her way in the male-dominated world of American  crime-writing, hence her involvement in the formation and success of the Sisters In Crime organisation, one of the subjects she was to speak on at the London Bouchercon.

In London, we finally met. I arranged  a private tour of the House of Commons for her and she gave me a t-shirt, which I still have, to induct me as an associate Sister In Crime - an honour I think only Robert Barnard and I held at the time.

It was the start of a friendship which was to span more than thirty years.

Margaret Brown Maron was born in Greensboro, North Carolina, growing up on her mother’s family farm. Aged 20, she was working in the Pentagon for the Joint Chiefs of Staff when she met young US naval officer Joseph Maron. They married and relocated to Italy on a three-year tour of duty. When they returned to the US it was to Joe’s home town of Brooklyn, which was to provide much of the background for her Sigrid Harald stories.

Margaret Maron in 1960

In 1972, the Marons with their young son John, moved to Willow Spring, North Carolina where Margaret was to write all her novels and many short stories including her most successful series featuring Judge Debora Knott, beginning with Bootlegger’s Daughter in 1992. In this, she pioneered the ‘regional mystery’ taking the action away from the ‘mean streets’ of urban settings.

Her twenty Deborah Knott books were to win her a staggering number of Agatha and Macavity awards, as well as an Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America, of which she served as President and was made a Grand Master in 2013. Her early involvement in the Sisters In Crime movement resulted in her becoming its third president and in 2016 she received an honorary doctorate from the University of North Carolina. 

Over the years I would receive, every Christmas,  a new Margaret Maron book, invariably accompanied by a parcel of salted pecan nuts from her garden, which was home to a ridiculous number of plastic pink flamingos, the result of a prank by fellow mystery writers which got laughably out of hand.

My wife and I hosted Margaret and Joe and their son and his wife whenever they visited England and in 2004, as I was recovering from a stroke, the Marons invited our entire family over to stay with them and I was invited to speak to the North Carolina Mystery Writers as Margaret’s guest of honour.

 My daughter Felicity (‘Fliss’) had already been immortalised as a character in Margaret’s novel Uncommon Clay, which she suitable inscribed.

As I was unable to attend the 2015 Bouchercon, held in Raleigh, North Carolina, I arranged a surprise presentation to her which was carried out by undercover agent and roving Shots reporter Ali Karim.

As I was unable to attend the 2015 Bouchercon, held in Raleigh, North Carolina, I arranged a surprise presentation to her which was carried out by undercover agent and roving Shots reporter Ali Karim.

Margaret died on 23rd February after complications following a stroke she suffered in December. My last contact with her, at Christmas, was to send her an advance proof of my forthcoming novel which is dedicated to her and her husband Joe and which opens on Harkers Island, North Carolina, where, in 2004, we sat out a hurricane together.

Her passing is a great loss to so many; her family, other authors and of course readers.  She will be sorely missed.

2019 Davitt Awards winners

Sisters in Crime Australia announced the winners of the 2019 Davitt Awards, named for Ellen Davitt (1812-1879), Australia’s first crime novelist, who wrote Australia's first mystery novel, Force and Fraud (1865).

Best Adult Crime Novel:
The Ruin by Dervla McTiernan (HarperCollins Australia)
Best Young Adult Crime Novel:
Small Spaces by Sarah Epstein (Walker Books)
Best Children’s Crime Novel:
Wakestone Hall by Judith Rossell (ABC Books)
Best Non-fiction Crime Book:
The Arsonist by Chloe Hooper (Penguin Random House)
Best Debut Novel:
Eggshell Skull by Bri Lee (Allen & Unwin)
Readers’ Choice:
The Lost Man by Jane Harper (Pan Macmillan Australia)

Calls for Chapters: Women Who Kill in English-speaking Cinema and TV Series of the Postfeminist Era

--> Within the fields of film and television studies, feminist critics and  scholars of the 1980s and 1990s have extensively analysed the figures  of women murderers in classical film genres like film noir and  melodrama, as well as in less savoury genres like the horror films of  the 1970s and 1980s. Such figures, often adapted from literary sources  (The Maltese Falcon, Leave Her to Heaven, Whatever Happened to Baby  Jane?, Tess of the D’Urbervilles), have existed since the silent era.  Yet what may have been an exception seems to be becoming more common.  Women who kill abound in contemporary films and TV shows, including  Butterfly Kiss (Michael Winterbottom, 1995), The Wire (HBO,  2002-2008), Kill Bill (Quentin Tarantino, 2003-2004), Monster (Patty  Jenkins, 2003), Lost (ABC, 2004-2010), Jennifer’s Body (Karyn Kusama,  2009), Bathory (Juraj Jakubisko, 2008), Luther (BBC, 2010-), The  Hunger Games (2012-2015), The Americans (FX, 2013-), Orange Is the New  Black (Netflix, 2013-), Prisoners (Denis Villeneuve, 2013) and Gone  Girl (David Fincher, 2014). The increasing number of these characters  probably goes hand in hand with the increasing number of strong female  heroines. Far from displaying gratuitous violence by women, some of  these contemporary works justify or, at least try to explain, why the  murders happened in the first place (as an act of revenge, an answer  to their oppression, a way to fit in their environment, an expression  of their psychotic personalities, and so forth), while others tend to  question these very motives. Seeing as many of today’s producers,  filmmakers and screenwriters have gone through film school, it is more  than likely that many are aware of the theses developed in feminist  film and television studies; Diablo Cody, for instance, admitted  having Barbara Creed’s Monstrous-Feminine in mind when writing the  screenplay for Jennifer’s Body. The series and films are also, no  doubt, reacting to discourses that have been widely circulating in the  media, and that testify to the impact queer, gender and feminist  studies have had on popular culture at large. Another contemporary  phenomenon that must be taken into account is postfeminism, a  “market-led phenomenon” which, by promoting female success stories,  seems to “lead to the conclusion that the time for feminism is past”  (Gamble 42-44). These women who kill may simply be symptomatic of postfeminist trends.

--> This collected volume will explore several lines of inquiry: the female murderer as a figure that destabilises order; the tension between criminal and victim; the relationship between crime and expression (or the lack thereof); and the paradox whereby a crime can be both an act of destruction and a creative assertion of agency. It will also aim at assessing the influence of feminist, queer and gender studies on mainstream television and cinema, notably in the genres (film noir, horror, melodrama) that have received the most critical attention from this perspective, but more importantly perhaps, at analysing the politics of representation by considering these works of fiction in their contexts and addressing some of the ambiguities raised by postfeminism.

--> Proposals must include a 300-500-word abstract, a short bibliography and a bio, and should be sent to the editors by December 31, 2016:

Zachary Baqué: zachary.baque@univ-tlse2.fr

Cristelle Maury: cristellemaury@gmail.com

David Roche: mudrock@neuf.fr

Selected Bibliography

Andrin, Muriel. Maléfiques, le mélodrame filmique américain et ses héroines, 1940-1953, Bruxelles, Berne, Berlin: Peter Lang, 2005.

Birch, Helen, ed. Moving Targets Women Murder and Representation. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994.

Burfoot and Lord, eds. Killing Women: The Visual Culture of Gender and  Violence. Waterloo: Wilfried Laurier, 2006.

Cadiet, Loïc, ed. Figures de femmes criminelles : De l'Antiquité à nos  jours. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2010.

Cardi, Coline and Geneviève Pruvost, eds. Penser la violence des  femmes. Paris: La Découverte, 2012.

Clover, Carol. J. Men, Women and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1992.

Cowie, Elizabeth. “Film Noir and Women.” Shades of Noir: a Reader. Ed.  Joan Copjec. London and New York: Verso, 1993. 121-65.

Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. London and New York: Routledge, 1993.

---. Phallic Panic: Film, Horror and the Primal Uncanny. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2005.

De Laurentis, Teresa. Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984.

Doane, Mary Ann. Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis. London and New York: Routledge, 1991.

Gamble, Sarah, ed. The Routledge Companion to Feminism and  Postfeminism. London and New York: Routledge, 2001.

-->

Grant, Barry Keith, ed. The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film. Austin: U of Texas P, 1996.

Grossman, Julie. Rethinking the Femme Fatale: Ready For Her Close-Up.  London: Palgrave, 2009.

Halberstam, Judith. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of  the Monster. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1995.

---. Female Masculinity. Durham, NC and London: Duke UP, 1998.

Hanson, Helen. Hollywood Heroines Women in Film Noir and the Female Gothic Film. London and New York: I. B. Tauris 2008.

Hanson Helen and Catherine O’Rawe. The Femme Fatale: Images, Histories, Contexts. London: Palgrave, 2010.

Hildenbrand, Karen, ed. Cycnos 23.2 (2006) “Figures de femmes assassines, représentations et idéologies.”  <http://revel.unice.fr/cycnos/index.html?id=618>.

Hooks, Bell. Real to Reel: Race, Class and Sex at the Movies. New York and London: Routledge, 2009 [1996].

Inness, Sherrie A. Tough Girls: Women Warriors and Wonder Women in Popular Culture. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1998.

---, ed. Action Chicks: New Images of Tough Women in Popular Culture.
Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

Jones, Ann. Women Who Kill. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996.

Kaplan E Ann, ed. Women in Film Noir. London: BFI, 1978.

Kuhn, Annette. Women’s Pictures: Feminism and Cinema. London and New York: Verso, 1993.

Modleski, Tania. Loving with a Vengeance. London and New York: Routledge, 2006.

Nalepa, Laurie and Richard Pfefferman. The Murder Mystique: Female Killers and Popular Culture. Wesport, CO and London: Praeger, 2013.

Parker L. Juli, ed. Representations of Murderous Women in Literature,Theatre, Film and Television: Examining the Patriarchal Presuppositions Behind the Treatment of Murderesses in Fiction and  Reality. Lewinston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press Ltd, 2010.

Plain, Gill. Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction: Gender, Sexuality and  the Body. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2001.

Rosalind, Gill. Gender and the Media. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006.

Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff, eds. New Femininities:Postfeminism, Neoliberalism and Subjectivity. Basingstone, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Russo, Mary. The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity. New York and London: Routledge, 1995.

Seal, Lizzie. Women, Murder and Femininity: Representations of Women Who Kill. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Stables, Kate. “The Postmodern Always Rings Twice: Constructing the Femme Fatale in 90s Cinema.” Women in Film Noir. Ed. E. Ann Kaplan.  London: BFI, 1998. 164-82.

Tasker Yvonne.  “Women in Film Noir.” A Companion to Film Noir. Ed. Andrew Spicer and Helen Hanson. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2013. 353-68.

---. Soldiers’ Stories: Military Women in Cinema and Television Since World War II. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2011.

Walker, Janet. “Hollywood, Freud and the Representation of Women: Regulations and Contradiction, 1945-early 60s.” Home is Where the Heart is, Studies in Melodrama and the Woman's Film. Ed. Christine  Gledhill. London: BFI, 1994. 197-214.

Wallace, Marilyn. Sisters in Crime. New York: Berkley Books, 1989.

Williams, Linda. “When the Woman Looks.” The Dread of Difference: Gender in the Horror Film. Ed. Barry Keith Grant. Austin, TX: U of Texas P, 1996: 15-34.