The Macavity Award Nominees 2019

The Macavity Awards are nominated by members of Mystery Readers International, subscribers to Mystery Readers Journal and friends of MRI for works published in 2008. 

Best Novel 

November Road by Lou Berney (William Morrow)
If I Die Tonight by Alison Gaylin (William Morrow)
The Lost Man by Jane Harper (Flat Iron Books)
Jar of Hearts by Jennifer Hillier (Minotaur Books)
Hiroshima Boy by Naomi Hirahara (Prospect Park Books)
Under My Skin by Lisa Unger (Harlequin - Park Row Books)

Best First Novel 

My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite (Doubleday)
Dodging and Burning by John Copenhaver (Pegasus Books)
Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens (G.P. Putnam’s Sons)
Something in the Water by Catherine Steadman (Ballantine)
The Chalk Man by C.J. Tudor (Crown)

Best Nonfiction 
The Metaphysical Mysteries of G.K. Chesterton: A Critical Study of the Father Brown Stories and Other Detective Fiction by Laird R. Blackwell (McFarland)
Conan Doyle for the Defense: The True Story of a Sensational British Murder, a Quest for Justice, and the World’s Most Famous Detective Writer by Margalit Fox (Random House)
Classic American Crime Fiction of the 1920s by Leslie S. Klinger (Pegasus Books)
I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer by Michelle McNamara (HarperCollins)
Agatha Christie: A Mysterious Life by Laura Thompson (Pegasus Books)
The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That Scandalized the World by Sarah Weinman (HarperCollins)

Best Short Story 

“Race to Judgment” by Craig Faustus Buck (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Nov/Dec 2018)
“All God’s Sparrows” by Leslie Budewitz (Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, May/Jun 2018)
“Bug Appétit” by Barb Goffman (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Nov/Dec 2018)
“Three-Star Sushi” by Barry Lancet (Down & Out: The Magazine, Vol.1, No. 3)
“The Cambodian Curse” by Gigi Pandian (The Cambodian Curse and Other Stories)
 “English 398: Fiction Workshop” by Art Taylor (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Jul/Aug 2018)

Sue Feder Memorial Award for Best Historical Mystery 
A Lady's Guide to Etiquette and Murder by Dianne Freeman (Kensington)
City of Ink by Elsa Hart (Minotaur)
Island of the Mad by Laurie R. King (Bantam)
The Widows of Malabar Hill by Sujata Massey (Soho Crime)
A Dying Note by Ann Parker (Poisoned Pen)
A Forgotten Place by Charles Todd (William Morrow)

Congratulations to all the nominated authors. The winners will be announced at opening ceremonies at Bouchercon in Dallas, TX, October 31, 2019.

US Supreme Court v Estate of Arthur Conan Doyle - the continuation

In what could be the preface for the key copyright ruling of 2015, lawyers for the estate of the long deceased Arthur Conan Doyle filed an appeal before the US Supreme Court this week.

Lawyers for the Conan Doyle estate are asking the USSC to a temporary stay of the June 2014 ruling by the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals while the lawyers file a formal appeal. The request comes after the 7th Circuit refused to stay its decision on 9 July.

Update: The request for the temporary stay has already been rejected.

Today’s appeal is the latest (and last, hopefully) stage in an 18 month long legal battle which will decide a critical point in copyright law.

Starting in February 2013, California lawyer and Holmes aficionado Leslie S. Klinger has been fighting a legal battle with the Conan Doyle estate over the exact copyright status of Holmes, Watson, and other literary creations of Conan Doyle. According to the estate, the characters and other details created by Conan Doyle are still under copyright, even though many of the stories written by Conan Doyle have fallen into the public domain.

Arthur Conan Doyle has been dead for 84 years, but due to extensions to copyright terms, ten of the 56 short stories he wrote about Sherlock Holmes are still in copyright. All of the short stories and the four novels were published between 1887 and 1927, and all of the works except the ten short stories have entered into the public domain in the US as copyrights expired. These works also entered the public domain in much of the world in the year 2001, 70 years after the author’s death.

On the basis of the 10 stories, the Conan Doyle estate has been collecting fees from any American publisher or media company which used the characters created by Conan Doyle.

Klinger disagreed with the estate’s interpretation, and in February 2013 he filed a lawsuit in order to get a definitive ruling on the matter. He was inspired to sue after the Conan Doyle estate had blocked the publication of his latest Holmes anthology, In the Company of Sherlock Holmes.

Klinger had declined to pay the license fee demanded by the estate, even though he (or rather, his publisher) had paid license fees for his previous Holmes works, including The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, The Sherlock Holmes Reference Library and The Grand Game: A Celebration of Sherlockian Scholarship.

Klinger’s lawyer’s won the lawsuit in December 2013, and then they won the appeal before the 7th Circuit in June 2014. The appeals court concurred with the district court, ruling that elements of stories in the public domain can be used by anyone because the stories are in the public domain.

Naturally the Conan Doyle estate doesn’t appreciate that the ruling has taken away its cash cow, and they are now appealing to the US Supreme Court.

The Conan Doyle estate is asking for a temporary stay of the appeal court ruling while they file an appeal before the US Supreme Court. Lawyers for the estate are asking for the temporary stay because Klinger has not submitted his new ontology to the estate, so they have no way to determine if it uses any elements from the 10 stories under copyright. (The fact that this issue could be resolved after the fact like any other copyright infringement case seems to have escaped the Conan Doyle estate.)

The estate’s application was filed with Justice Elena Kagan, who is responsible for handling requests for temporary legal orders from cases from the 7th circuit. The Klinger case against the state began in federal district court in Illinois. Justice Kagan has the authority to grant or deny the stay request on her own, and she can also choose to share it with her colleagues or for a response from Klinger before making a decision.

It’s difficult to say what Kagan will decide, but it’s worth noting that she was part of the majority opinion in the 2012 Kirtsaeng decision. That case affirmed the concept of the First Sale doctrine, limiting the control a copyright holder has over a work once it has been sold.

 

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