Edgar and Agatha Award Winners

Mystery Writers of America just announced the Winners of the 2014 Edgar Allan Poe Awards, honouring the best in mystery fiction, non-fiction and television, published or produced in 2013.

Best Novel 

Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger (Simon & Schuster – Atria Books)

Best First Novel

Red Sparrow by Jason Matthews (Simon & Schuster - Scribner)

Best Paperback Original

The Wicked Girls by Alex Marwood (Penguin Group USA - Penguin Books)

Best Fact Crime

The Hour of Peril: The Secret Plot to Murder Lincoln Before the Civil War by Daniel Stashower (Minotaur Books)

Best Critical/Biographical

America is Elsewhere: The Noir Tradition in the Age of Consumer Culture by Erik Dussere (Oxford University Press)

Best Short Story

"The Caxton Private Lending Library and Book Depository" – Bibliomysteries by John Connolly (Mysterious)

Best Juvenile

One Came Home by Amy Timberlake (Random House Children's Books – Alfred A. Knopf BFYR)

Young Adult

Ketchup Clouds by Annabel Pitcher (Hachette Book Group – Little, Brown Books for Young Readers) 

TV Episode Teleplay

"Episode 1" – The Fall, Teleplay by Allan Cubitt (Netflix)

Robert L. Fish Memorial

"The Wentworth Letter"– Criminal Element's Malfeasance Occasional
by Jeff Soloway (St. Martin's Press)

Mary Higgins Clark Award

Cover of Snow by Jenny Milchman (Random House Publishing Group – Ballantine Books)

Grand Master

Robert Crais 

Carolyn Hart

Raven Award

Aunt Agatha's Bookstore, Ann Arbor, Michigan

The full list of all the nominees can be found here.

The Agatha Award Winners  

The awards were given out at Malice Domestic on  3^rd May  2014.

Best First Novel:
Death Al Dente by Leslie Budewitz (Berkley Prime Crime)

Best Historical Novel:
A Question of Honor by Charles Todd (William Morrow)

Best Contemporary Novel:
The Wrong Girl by Hank Phillippi Ryan (Forge Books)

Best Nonfiction:
The Hour of Peril: The Secret Plot to Murder Lincoln Before the Civil War by Daniel Stashower (Minotaur Books)

Best Short Story:
"The Care and Feeding of House Plants" by Art Taylor (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine)

Best Children's/YA Nominations:
Escape from Mr. Lemoncello's Library by Chris Grabenstein (Random House Books)

The full list of nominees can be found here.

Congratulations to all!

Quentin Bates's Ordinary people and desperate measures

©TonyPrower.com

Quentin Bates went native in Iceland for ten years before returning to live in England.  He drew heavily on his intimate experience of life there to write his debut novel Frozen Out, published by Constable & Robinson.  He is also the author of Cold Comfort, Chilled to the Bone and the novella Winterlude.  The latest book in the series is Cold Steal has recently been released as an e-Book only.

It’s hard to tell where the spark that sets a book off comes from.  Sometimes it’s an incident, or else it can be a place that’s too good to be resisted as a location.  This time it was a couple of characters and an idle hour that set the imagination running.

Cold Steal started life at a provincial airport with an hour or two to kill in a half-empty departure lounge before a flight to a fairly dull trade show.  There they were, three characters who just emerged from the background. One was in chef’s whites; one serving tables and the third was deep in a Cyrillic newspaper while a cup of coffee cooled on the table in front of her.  The three running the place had different flags on their badges – all from different parts of the world, all three doing long hours for minimum wage and none of them looked too happy.

Having been an expat and a minimum wage dogsbody myself a long time ago, I have a great deal of sympathy for and interest in how people cope in a culture that’s not their own.  Things have changed since I lived in Iceland and foreigners were something of a rarity.  Now it’s much like the rest of Europe with a significant immigrant population, much of it doing the invisible grunt work that most people prefer to avoid, stacking shelves, delivering parcels, serving coffees and sandwiches, cleaning offices after the staff have gone home and all the other work that people see being done every day but don’t give a second glance to.

I had to invent the backgrounds of the three women from scratch, but the restaurant trio were too interesting a proposition not to use.  So the Reindeer Cleaners came to life, and combined with some ideas I had picked up on housebreaking from another (don’t ask…) source, Orri the Burglar also popped up as part of the cast.

The plot of Cold Steal veered away from the three foreigners and centred more increasingly

around Orri the Burglar.  Iceland has gone from being practically crime-free a few decades ago – and in some parts of Iceland you can still leave the keys in your car overnight – to having much the same rate of crime as anywhere else, especially with the rise of acquisitive crime.  So Orri’s activities became fascinating, not least when he breaks into the wrong house one dark night and finds himself facing far more than the swift exit with a few purloined goodies he had expected.

It’s almost a variation on the theme of people displaced to a culture other than their own, pushing characters into doing things that don’t come naturally to them.  In the burglar’s case, blackmailed into doing someone else’s dirty work and finding himself neck-deep in trouble.  It’s one of the facets of crime fiction that for me makes writing the bad guys at least as interesting as the sleuths and often more so.  Lifting relatively ordinary people from their comfort zones to do bad things or dropping them in deep trouble that calls for desperate measures is always a challenge to be relished, such as the awkward city gent who finds himself abducted and left to die in a remote place in the highlands of Iceland with little chance of being found or rescued.

Does he survive without a taxi rank or a Starbucks in sight and no idea where he is?  I’m not saying, but both options were tempting and it wasn’t until the last moment that I decided just what to do with the poor man.

You can find out more about Quentin Bates on his website or you can also read his blog.  He can also be found on Twitter and on Facebook.

Charles Cumming’s A COLDER WAR Mole Hunt

Harper Collins are running a special competition to celebrate the release of Charles Cumming’s latest international spy thriller, A Colder War.  

The competition involves a mole hunt. The name of the mole has been hidden amongst blog posts around the internet (see the banner below).

In each post, there are a couple of questions (mine, the final ones are below). The first letter in each answer is in the name of the mole and the answers can be found in the videos. Collect all the answers, and email your answer to killerreads[at]harpercollins.com. The winner gets a Kindle!

Check out the videos of Charles Cumming below and answer the questions. Incredibly simple!

Question 9:- A Colder War is the _______ to A Foreign Country? 

Question 10:- Complete the title of Arthur Miller’s great American play, Death of A _____? 

Best of luck to those of you that have entered the competition.

Doug Johnstone on writing The Dead Beat

Doug Johnstone is the author of five previous novels, most recently the acclaimed Gone Again (2013), described by Ian Rankin as 'a fast-paced thriller with a very human touch.’  A freelance journalist, songwriter, and musician, he also has a PhD in nuclear physics.  He lives in Edinburgh.

‘Here we are now, entertain us.’

Recognise this as a Nirvana lyric?  If you do, you’re one of us.  My latest novel, The Dead Beat, is soaked in the spirit of grunge, which is unusual considering it’s mostly set in modern day Edinburgh, and the grunge phenomenon happened over twenty years ago.

But like in a lot of crime novels, the secrets about what’s happening in the present day lie in the past.  Martha Fluke is just beginning a new job as a trainee journalist, reluctantly on the obituary desk.  When someone phones in, reads his own obituary then shoots himself, she’s sent on a chase across town and into her own past to find out why the hell people have started killing themselves.

The answer lies with her parents’ generation, and that’s where the grunge comes in.  Her estranged mum and dead dad met through the grunge and alt.rock scene of Edinburgh in the early 90s, first flirting at an infamous Nirvana gig in The Southern Bar (which I was at, by the way).  Their relationship is told through four flashback gigs, Nirvana, Soundgarden, Afghan Whigs, and finally Teenage Fanclub, but the music from that time seeps into the present day, as Martha travels around town listening to her deceased dad’s cassette collection on his old Sony Walkman.

Part of this whole grunge thing was simply that I wanted to use my own experience as much as possible in the novel.  I always do, threading deeply personal stuff into each of my books, and I don’t think I’ve seen the grunge scene depicted in fiction before.

But on another level, I discovered as I began writing that I wanted to look at the disconnect between Generation X and the current generation of teenagers and young adults (where are we now?  Gen Z?  Starting again at Gen A?)

The lyrics to that famous Nirvana song are wonderfully ambivalent about life and success, ‘it’s fun to lose’ Kurt says early on, and that was reflected across the whole generation.  Beck had a massive hit with a song called ‘Loser’, for God’s sake. It seemed important back then not to be careerist, not to give a fuck about being successful, not to really have any ambition, and it’s a mind-set I think I’ve kind of carried through my life, for better or worse.

But how does that look to kids today?  That’s where Martha comes in – she’s confident and

ambitious, but not without her problems, struggling with mental health issues all her life, a possible legacy from her disturbed father.  Can she find a way to cope with life?  Can she find out who she really is by digging deeper into her family history?  Or do we just create our family around us; make a home out of whatever comfort we can get?

These are some of the bigger questions that lurk under the surface of The Dead Beat.  But at its heart it’s a romp of a book, a breakneck thriller around Edinburgh that manages to take in all-female wrestling, a burnt-down house, Kurt Cobain asking for Benylin, outdoor sex, a trip to a secure mental hospital, an offbeat romance, some characters from my fourth novel Hit & Run turning up again, drugs, booze, some doses of electroconvulsive therapy, a kick-ass soundtrack of course, and, naturally for a crime novel, some mysterious deaths to solve.  All in fewer words than it takes Donna Tartt to write a prologue.  ‘Entertain us,’ indeed.

You can find out more about Doug Johnstone on his blog or you can follow him on Twitter @doug_johnstone

The Dead Beat by Doug Johnstone is out now, £12.99 (Faber & Faber)