2016 Arthur Ellis Shortlist

The 2016 Arthur Ellis Awards shortlist have been revealed.  The winners will be announced at a gala dinner that will take place on 26th May 2016 at the Arts and Letters Club, Toronto.

Best Novel

Hungry Ghosts by Peggy Blair (Simon & Schuster)

The Storm Murders by John Farrow (Minotaur)

Hungary by Andrew Hunt (Minotaur)

Open Season by Peter Kirby (Linda Leith Publishing)

The Night Bell by Inger Ash Wolfe (McClelland & Stewart)

Best First Novel

Hard Drive by J. Mark Collins (iUniverse)

What Kills Good Men by David Hood (Vagrant Press)

The Unquiet Dead by Ausma Zehanat Khan (Minotaur)

Encore by Alexis Koetting (Five Star)

Old Bones by Brian R. Lindsay (Volumes Publishing)

Best Novella

Black Canyon by Jeremy Bates (Dark Hearts)

Deadly Season by Alison Bruce (Imajin Books)

Glow Glass by M.H. Callway (Carrick Publishing)

The Night Thief by Barbara Fradkin (Orca Book Publishers)

Beethoven’s Tenth by Brian Harvey (Orca Book Publishers)

Best Short Story

With One Shoe, The Playground of Lost Toys by Karen Abrahamson (Exile Press)

The Seige by Hilary Davidson (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine)

The Water Was Rising by Sharon Hunt (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine)

The Avocado Kid by Scott Mackay (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine)

Movable Type by S. G. Wong AB Negative Anthology, (Coffin Hop Press)

Best Book in French

L'Affaire Myosotis by Luc Chartrand (Québec Amérique)

L'affaire Céline by Jean-Louis Fleury (Éditions Alire)

La bataille de Pavie by André Jacques (Druide)        

Le mauvais côté des choses by Jean Lemieux (Québec Amérique)

L'affaire Mélodie Cormier by Guillaume Morrissette, (Guy Saint-Jean éditeur)

Best Juvenile/YA Book

Diego’s Crossing by Robert Hough (Annick Press)

Set You Free by Jeff Ross (Orca)

The Blackthorn Key by Kevin Sands (Aladdin)

The Dogs by Allan Stratton (Scholastic)

Trouble is a Friend of Mine by Stephanie Tromley (Kathy Dawson Books)

The Dundurn Unhanged Arthur for Best Unpublished First Crime Novel

When the Flood Falls by Jayne Barnard

Knight Blind by Alice Bienia

Brave Girls by Pam Isfeld

Better the Devil You Know by J.T. Siemens

Give Out Creek by J.G. Toews

Best Nonfiction Book

Human on the Inside: Unlocking the Truth about Canada’s Prisons by Gary Garrison (University of Regina Press)

Empire of Deception by Dean Jobb (Harper Collins Publishers)

The Bastard of Fort Stikine: The Hudson’s Bay Company and the Murder of John McLoughlin Jr by Debra Komar (Goose Lane Editions)

Cold War by Jerry Langton (Harper Collins Publishers)

Mr. Big: The Investigation into the Deaths of Karen and Krista Hart by Colleen Lewis and Jennifer Hicks (Flanker Press)

Congratulations to all the nominees.

Crime Fraternity Reclaims Shakespeare

Peter James, one of the most influential crime authors at work today, has claimed: “If Shakespeare were alive today, he’d be a crime author.” 

‘King of the police procedural’ James recently won the Crime Writers’ Association’s highest honour, the CWA Diamond Dagger award. He is also 2016 Programming Chair of Europe’s biggest celebration of the genre, the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival.

Peter said: “If you look at Shakespeare’s plays, 50% feature a courtroom scene of some kind. In Othello, Iago is an absolute manipulative monster- an Elizabethan Hannibal Lecter - Lady Macbeth is the ultimate schemer, as is Hamlet and King Lear’s Goneril and Regan. If published as a novelist today he would be stacked on the crime shelves of bookshops; his most engaging, challenging characters were villains.”

Marking the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival and the CWA conducted a snapshot survey asking crime authors if they agreed with the assertion; 60% did.

Sarah Hilary, who won the Theakstons Old Peculier crime novel of the year award in 2015 - one of the UK’s top crime-writing awards - for her debut Someone Else’s Skin, said Shakespeare would have ‘indisputably’ been a crime author today, “specialising in psychological thrillers with a delicious seasoning of political satire.”

CWA member Gary Fraser-Sampson agreed: “Shakespeare understood the dark recesses of the soul, both the agony of an instinctive action with unforeseen consequences and the blackness of pure evil.”

Kate Ellis, who combines history and crime in her Wesley Peterson detective series, said: “I certainly agree with Peter James that Shakespeare would be a crime writer if he were alive today.”

Author of the Frances Doughty mysteries, Linda Stratmann, also concurred: “Undoubtedly. His plays are rife with crimes and cruelty of all kinds, and explore the family tensions and social and political issues that lead to criminal behaviour….Shakespeare really understood human nature, especially its darker side, – he wrote about love and hate, jealousy and greed, injured pride and revenge, all the themes that lead to crime. When we watch a Shakespeare play we recognise ourselves.”

Historical crime fiction author Robin Blake felt as a dramatist, Shakespeare would be writing for TV: “Many of his plots revolve around crime, suggesting he’d turn out brilliant TV crime dramas, like those of Sally Wainwright or Vince Gilligan.”

Author of the Campbell Lawless Victorian Mysteries William Sutton said: “All plays revolved around mysteries, secrets, misunderstandings etc. All readers are sleuths, trying to make sense of the human condition.”

Those who disagreed felt he would be writing across genres, including historical fiction and rom-com.

Peter James argued Shakespeare would have embraced the medium of the novel if he were at work today. “Storytelling was originally an oral tradition with storytellers like Socrates, then Shakespeare, which is why he told stories through plays,” he said. “In Shakespeare’s time very few people would read, few could afford to buy books. In 1935, Penguin launched the first paperbacks and reading for the masses took off. Back in Shakespeare’s times his plays were seen as low culture, today he’d certainly be writing novels to reach the commercial masses.”

Peter added that the reluctance to see Shakespeare as one of the early exponents of the genre is because of the ‘prevailing snobbery’ around the crime genre.

“I remember asking the Chair of the Booker prize ten years ago why crime novels didn’t feature, he said hell would freeze over before crime makes the shortlist,” Peter said. “It is of course nonsense, over the last 20 years the list has featured many novels that fit the genre, such as Brian Moore’s Lies of Silence. Some authors object to being be categorised as crime out of literary snobbery.

“My eyes were opened to the potential for exploring human nature through the world of crime over thirty years ago, when my house was burgled, and a detective came round to take fingerprints. We became friendly and got invited to a few police social nights. I found his friends fascinating - homicide detectives, traffic police, CSI, police divers - no one sees more of humanity and life in a 30 year career than a cop, they deal with every facet of existence.”

“I began to realise if you wanted to write about the world we live in and human nature, the police offers the biggest window.”

Novelist Julia Crouch started her career as a theatre director and playwright. Her husband actor Tim Crouch is currently performing ‘The Complete Deaths’ a tribute to the 74 onstage deaths in the works of Shakespeare. Julia said, “I would argue that Hamlet is the first great psychological thriller… There is a big confusion in Western culture about popularity and worth. Crime fiction is generally seen by the establishment as a lesser literary form to, say, literary fiction. But as Peter James so eloquently argues, it is, in many ways, superior - the best has to have great writing plus page-turning plots.” 

One of the genres biggest bestselling crime authors, Jo Nesbo, announced in 2014, he would be adapting Macbeth as a modern crime novel. Crime authors also cited Shakespeare as an influence in their own writing.

Author Isabelle Grey said, “Danny Brocklehurst and I each wrote one of the final two episodes in the second series of Jimmy McGovern's Accused for BBC1 which featured a troubled young man inspired by Hamlet.”

Whatever genre, as noir novelist Richard Godwin said, “All literature owes him a debt, arguably he was the greatest writer who has ever lived.”

My inspiration for Sunset City by Melissa Ginsburg

Today’s guest blog is by Melissa Ginsburg who is a published poet and currently teaches creative writing at the University of Mississippi. She talks about what inspired her to write Sunset City.

 

As a writer of short, non-narrative lyric poetry, I wanted to see if I could write a novel. I have always read novels and loved crime novels especially. Borrowing the tropes and structure of noir appealed to me, because I thought it would be helpful to work within some kind of frame as I taught myself how to write fiction.

I thought of noir as a form, like a sonnet or a villanelle. It allowed me to keep the elements of the novel upright. I knew if I tried to write a novel without some kind of frame in mind, I would end up with a rambling, jumble of images and character sketches. I wanted to write something tight, that moved fast, where every line is in service to that momentum.  I have a tendency to focus on moments, images, characters, and places. I knew plot would be the hardest thing for me, because I had never dealt with it before. Having a sense of the book’s shape really helped me to keep moving everything forward.

The other elements of the novel—characters, setting, tone—came much more easily to me. I wanted to write about women, and I wanted to write about Houston, which I think is a perfect place for noir. It’s enormous, home to 6.5 million people, and it sprawls over a huge amount of land. There is plenty of space in between everything, and it’s easy to be anonymous there. Most people stay in their air-conditioned cars, and there aren’t a lot of public spaces, so it’s unlikely that you would run into anyone unless it was intentional. It’s an easy place to hide, to stay under the radar. It’s perfect for crimes!

When I moved from Houston to Iowa City, a small mid-western college town, losing that anonymity and privacy was the most difficult cultural adjustment for me. It was even harder than the mid-western winters. I was in Iowa City when I began writing Sunset City. I felt homesick for Texas, even though when I lived there I couldn’t wait to leave. That ambivalence towards home interested me as a writer. It mirrors the conflicted relationships many of the book’s characters have with one another. The experience of deeply loving a place or a person you don’t want to be around, that is an emotional situation that I think is common to a lot of people and incredibly poignant.

Sunset City by Melissa Ginsburg (£12.99 Faber & Faber) Out now.

Danielle Reeves was Charlotte Ford’s most loyal and vibrant friend.  She helped Charlotte through her mother’s illness and death, and opened up about her own troubled family.  The two friends were inseparable, reveling in Houston s shadowy corners. But Danielle s addiction got the best of her and she went to prison for four years.  When she gets out, she and Charlotte reconnect. Charlotte hopes this is a new start for their friendship.  Then a detective shows up at Charlotte s apartment. Danielle has been murdered, bludgeoned to death.  Overwhelmed by grief, Charlotte is determined to understand how the most alive person she has ever known could end up dead. The deeper Charlotte descends into Danielle s dark world, the less she understands. Was Danielle a hapless victim or master manipulator? Was she really intent on starting over, or was it all an act? To find the truth, Charlotte must keep her head clear and her guard up. Houston has a way of feeding on bad habits, and Charlotte doesn’t want to get swallowed whole.

More information about the author can be found on her website.

Find her on Facebook.

Follow her on Twitter @ginsburgmelissa

Amanda Jennings on 5 books of my past

I love thinking back over the books that I have read in my past. It’s wonderful to remember those that struck a special chord and consider why they meant something special to me, why I identified so strongly with them at that particular time in my life. 

Books are the gateways to other worlds. They provide snapshots of a different way of life and allow the reader to experience all sorts of things – dangerous, sad, terrifying, romantic, erotic, fantastical – and all from the safety of a favourite reading spot. Escapism, stepping out of conscious reality and into the pages of a book, even if only occasionally, is a glorious thing.

Books are tools of empathy, they allow us to walk in another person’s shoes. It was the books I’ve had an emotional connection with that helped to cultivate my sense of injustice, opened my mind, made me think, and challenged me, and hence have had the greatest impact. The five I’ve selected from a very long list are:

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Soon after we got together, my then-boyfriend, now-husband, was appalled when he found out I hadn’t read this book. He gave me his many-times read copy and insisted I read it. I feel in love with the book from the first page. Everything about this story of prejudice, hypocrisy and justice transfixed me. As I turned the pages, I was enveloped by the story of Scout and Atticus and the idea that we must all be brave and stand up for what is good and right. I gave my husband a signed copy of the book for our first wedding anniversary and our second daughter’s middle name is Scout.

Animal Farm by George Orwell

This allegorical gem from George Orwell was the first book to make me cry real tears. I must have been about thirteen when we read it out loud at school, each of us taking it in turns to read passages. When we reached the part where Boxer is loaded into the horse transporter and driven away – betrayed, lied to, used and dispatched, his innocence and faith present as he walks trustingly to his fate – my tears flowed freely. Even now that scene has the power to move me deeply.

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

I read this book when I was about fifteen and was mesmerised by this nightmarish vision of society. It was like nothing I had ever read before – and I’d go so far as to say like nothing I’ve read since. I was both horrified and addicted to Alex, Our Humble Narrator, and his gang of Droogs as they marauded heir way through the pages in a flurry of rape and mindless violence, my stomach seizing up with disgust and fascination. I later learnt that Burgess wrote the book in a matter of weeks following an attack on his wife by a group of men that resulted in her miscarrying, which gives this depiction of a broken dystopian society yet more resonance. Removed from us, yes, but not so very far.

Carrie by Stephen King

This revenge parable, with bullying at its core, held me from the first page. I knew what Carrie was doing as she wreaks havoc on her tormentors was wrong, but at the same time I cheered her on. The depictions of the bullies, that group of girls intent on making the vulnerable outcast’s life a misery with taunting, teasing and humiliating her, cut to the bone. King was one of my favourite writers as a teen, and this tale stuck with me as an example of how cruelty and unkindness should have no place in any human interaction.

Atonement by Ian McEwan

Such a beautifully written book. The prose is stunning and Ian MacEwan captures that period so perfectly you feel as if you are living with the Tallis family. I read it when it came out, I was twenty-eight and had just had my second child, and I understood childhood very differently once I had become a mother. The pain of watching Briony wrongly accuse Robbie in a fit of childish petulance and hurt, of observing the far-reaching effects of that lie, undoubtedly influenced on the type of stories I now write myself. Atonement is one of the books I wish I’d written.

In Her Wake, by Amanda Jennings is published by Orenda Books

£8.99

You can find out more information about her work on her website.  You can also follow Amanda Jennings on Twitter @MandaJJennings

Some Small Thing, Revisited

I recently saw novelist Jonathan Evison (This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance; The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving) read at a bookstore in Denver.  During the Q & A, a woman asked him about the role of personal experience in fiction writing, and his response has stuck with me: every morning he thinks, Something will happen today that will find its way into my fiction.  Some small thing that might come back to me years later (closely paraphrased). 

This was not a dressed up version of the old "write what you know" cliché. I don't necessarily believe in writing what you know, at least not exclusively: fiction, at its best, is an empathetic gesture, and that requires stepping outside of yourself.  I'm pretty sure Evison would agree: his most recent protagonist is an elderly woman who reflects on her life as death approaches. 

Instead of grandiose, defining experiences, Evison was talking about those small moments we can't possibly anticipate, the contingencies that pop up every day and ultimately give our lives (and fiction) texture.  This is a beautiful, possibly spiritual idea—the fabric of life becoming, unconsciously, the fabric of art.  I started looking for these small moments in my own work. 

Here are just a few examples, taken entirely out of context, from The Exiled.  I've deliberately avoided spoilers.

1.  "The (bath)room was a nearly uninterrupted mosaic of small encaustic tiles.  They covered the walls, the ceiling, the base of the toilet and sink.  Raney found no principle guiding their arrangement, no pattern or color scheme.  Like taking a shit inside the mind of a madman, he thought."

A long time ago (17 years?), I met a friend for dinner at an off-the-grid Egyptian restaurant in Queens, NY.  I knew nothing about the restaurant beforehand.  As a labor of love, the owner/chef had covered every surface—floor, tabletops, support beams, doors—with mosaics made of colored glass and tile.  He was an artist, not a psychopath, but in fiction our real-life encounters are almost always repurposed.  The restaurant has since been featured in the New York Times and is no longer off the grid, though the menu (you can order anything from hummus to lamb testicles) and ambience remain much the same.           

2.  "The stoop granny had company now, was part of a small crowd gathered around a parrot in a bamboo cage.  People were laughing, listening to the bird fire off a pattern of staccato squeals.  Dunham stopped to look.

           

'It's the rats,' a man said.  'He imitates the rats.'"

A few years ago, the City of New York decided to tear up the street outside my apartment in Brooklyn.  The rats fled for higher ground.  My building was somehow spared, but our neighbors weren't so lucky.  Doris, who lived in the first-floor apartment directly next door, was particularly afflicted.  Doris is the type to clean grouting with a toothbrush: this was deeply traumatic for her. Shortly after the problem had passed (her husband killed them one by one with a hammer), I saw Doris standing outside, shaking and crying a little.  I asked her what was wrong.  "My bird," she said.  "He imitates the rats.  He won't stop squealing." 

3.  "'Detective Raney, right?  From New York?  More people per square block than in all of this county.  You must find it dull as dirt out here."

This one is minor—just a fragment of conversation—but it stands out to me because I couldn't have been older than ten at the time.  My family lived in an apartment complex in Queens, NY.  We were visiting family in Montana.  My great uncle owned a fish hatchery, and he had a young (20?) apprentice.  Someone asked my father how many people lived in our complex.  The apprentice did some quick math and said, "A fella could have himself a girl on every block."  Lord knows why this scrap resurfaced thirty years later, while I was working on this scene, but it did.   

There are many more, but you get the idea.  It's worth noting, as a kind of flourish, that I

didn't leave Evison's Q & A thinking I had the subject for a future blog post.

The Exiled by Christopher Charles (Mulholland Books, £14.99) out on 21 April 2016

Can we ever truly run from our past? Fifteen years ago, Detective Wes Raney was a New York City Narcotics Detective with a growing drug habit of his own. While working undercover, he made decisions that ultimately cost him not only his career, but also his family. Disgraced, Raney fled New York - but his past is finally catching up with him. For more than a decade, Raney has been living in exile, the sole murder detective covering a two-hundred mile stretch of desert in New Mexico. His solitude is his salvation - but it ends when a brutal drug deal gone wrong results in a triple murder. Staged in a locked underground bunker, the crime reawakens Raney's haunted and violent past. The Exiled follows Raney in a brilliant dual narrative that takes the reader from the crime-ridden streets of New York City in the 1980s, when crack was king, to the vast, open spaces of the American west. In both places, the only sure thing is that the choices you make will haunt you somewhere down the line...

You can follow him on FaceBook. and find him on Twitter @chrisnarozny

2016 Petrona Award shortlist

Top quality crime fiction from Scandinavia is shortlisted for the 2016 Petrona Award.

Crime novels from Finland, Norway and Sweden have made the shortlist for the 2016 Petrona Award for the Best Scandinavian Crime Novel of the Year, which is announced today.

They are:

THE DROWNED BOY by Karin Fossum tr. Kari Dickson (Harvill Secker; Norway)
THE DEFENCELESS by Kati Hiekkapelto tr. David Hackston (Orenda Books; Finland)
THE CAVEMAN by Jorn Lier Horst tr. Anne Bruce (Sandstone Press; Norway)
THE GIRL IN THE SPIDER'S WEB by David Lagercrantz tr. George Goulding (MacLehose Press; Sweden)
SATELLITE PEOPLE by Hans Olav Lahlum tr. Kari Dickson (Mantle/Pan Macmillan; Norway)
DARK AS MY HEART by Antti Tuomainen tr. Lola Rogers (Harvill Secker; Finland)

The winning title will be announced at the Gala Dinner on 21 May during the annual international crime fiction event CrimeFest, held in Bristol 19-22 May 2016.

The award is open to crime fiction in translation, either written by a Scandinavian author or set in Scandinavia and published in the UK in the previous calendar year.

The judges’ comments on the shortlist:

THE DROWNED BOY by Karin Fossum tr. Kari Dickson (Harvill Secker; Norway)
Fossum’s spare prose and straightforward narrative belie the complexity at the heart of this novel. After the drowning of a young child with Down’s Syndrome, Chief Inspector Sejer must ask himself if one of the parents could have been involved. The nature of grief is explored, along with the experience of parenting children with learning difficulties. There’s a timeless feel to the writing and a sense of justice slowly coming to pass.

THE DEFENCELESS by Kati Hiekkapelto tr. David Hackston (Orenda

Books; Finland)
The second in Hiekkapelto’s ‘Anna Fekete’ series is an assured police procedural rooted in the tradition of the Nordic social crime novel. Its exploration of immigrant experiences is nuanced and timely, and is woven into an absorbing mystery involving an elderly man’s death and the escalating activities of an international gang. A mature work by a writer who is unafraid to take on challenging topics.

THE CAVEMAN by Jorn Lier Horst tr. Anne Bruce (Sandstone Press; Norway)
Horst’s The Caveman begins with the discovery of a four-month-old corpse just down the road from William Wisting’s home. Troubled by his neighbour’s lonely death in an apparently uncaring society, the Chief Inspector embarks on one of the most disturbing cases of his career. Beautifully written, this crime novel is a gripping read that draws on the author’s own experiences to provide genuine insights into police procedure and investigation.



THE GIRL IN THE SPIDER'S WEB by David Lagercrantz tr. George

Goulding (MacLehose Press; Sweden)
The late Stieg Larsson created the groundbreaking, two-fingers-to-society, bisexual anti-heroine Lisbeth Salander. When Larsson’s publishers commissioned a fourth book, they turned to David Lagercrantz, whose The Girl in the Spider’s Web often reads uncannily like Larsson’s own text. His real achievement is the subtle development of Salander’s character; she remains (in Lagercrantz’s hands) the most enigmatic and fascinating anti-heroine in fiction.

SATELLITE PEOPLE by Hans Olav Lahlum tr. Kari Dickson (Mantle/Pan Macmillan; Norway)
An accomplished homage to Agatha Christie, Satellite People adds a Nordic twist to classic crime fiction tropes. References to Christie novels abound, but Lahlum uses a Golden Age narrative structure to explore Norway’s wartime past, as Inspector Kristiansen and Patricia investigate a former Resistance fighter’s death. Excellent characterisation, a tight plot and a growing sense of menace keep the reader guessing until the denouement.

DARK AS MY HEART by Antti Tuomainen tr. Lola Rogers (Harvill

Secker; Finland)
Tuomainen’s powerful and involving literary crime novel has a mesmerising central concept: thirty-year-old Aleksi is sure he knows who was behind his mother’s disappearance two decades ago, but can he prove it? And to what extent does his quest for justice mask an increasingly unhealthy obsession with the past? Rarely has atmosphere in a Nordic Noir novel been conjured so evocatively.

With grateful thanks to each of the translators for their skill and expertise in bringing us these outstanding examples of Scandinavian crime fiction.

The judges are:

Barry Forshaw – Writer and journalist specialising in crime fiction and film; author of four books covering Scandinavian crime fiction: NORDIC NOIR, DEATH IN A COLD CLIMATE, EURO NOIR and the first biography of Stieg Larsson.

Dr. Katharina Hall – Associate Professor of German at Swansea University; editor of CRIME FICTION IN GERMAN: DER KRIMI for University of Wales Press; international crime fiction reviewer/blogger at MRS. PEABODY INVESTIGATES.

Sarah Ward – Crime novelist, author of IN BITTER CHILL (Faber and Faber), and crime fiction blogger at CRIMEPIECES.

(L-R Sarah Ward, Barry Forshaw, Karen Meek and Kat Hall)

More information can be found on the Petrona Award website.

(http://www.petronaaward.co.uk).