Agatha Award Winners - Malice Domestic

The Agatha Awards were presented at the Malice Domestic Banquet on 29th April 2017. Winners in each category were decided by the attendees of Malice Domestic 29.

Best Contemporary Novel
A Great Reckoning by Louise Penny (Minotaur Books)

Best Historical Novel
The Reek of Red Herrings by Catriona McPherson (Minotaur Books)

Best First Novel
The Semester of our Discontent by Cynthia Kuhn (Henery Press)

Best Nonfiction
Mastering Suspense, Structure, and Plot: How to Write Gripping Stories that Keep Readers on the Edge of Their Seats by Jane K. Cleland (Writer's Digest Books)

Best Short Story
"Parallel Play" by Art Taylor in Chesapeake Crimes: Storm Warning (Wildside Press)

Best Children/Young Adult
The Secret of the Puzzle Box: The Code Busters Club by Penny Warner (Darby Creek)

Lifetime Achievement: Charlaine Harris

Poirot Award: Martin Edwards

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

Congratulations to all the winners.

Call For Papers - Worlding Crime Fiction: From the National to the Global

CFP: ACLA conference (Utrecht, 6-9 July 2017)

http://www.acla.org/worlding-crime-fiction-national-global

Since Raymond Chandler published the “Simple Art of Murder” (1944), a distinction has been made between the worldliness of the American hardboiled tradition (“It’s not a very fragrant world, but it’s the world you live in,” Chandler said of Hammett’s fiction) and the artificial, unrealistic and detached “Cheesecake Manor” of the classic detective novel. Moreover, there is a tendency in crime fiction studies to distinguish between the Anglo-American practice of crime writing and specific national crime traditions, the study of which has focused on how national crime fiction texts differ from the universalising Anglo-American norm. Both these distinctions have traditionally resulted in nation-centric readings of the genre as it has developed in specific countries and cultures.

This seminar seeks to further develop our understanding of this global genre that began with “Crime Fiction as World Literature” (ACLA 2015) and “Translating Crime: Production, Transformation and Reception” (ACLA 2016). To this end, we invite contributions that attempt to “world” the crime genre (Kadir 2004), to explore the genre’s worldliness within, but also beyond, specific national traditions.

The seminar explores three main ideas:

1)   The “presence of the world within the nation” (Damrosch 2015) – the ways in which seemingly nationally-bounded novels engage with the world beyond the nation in which they originate

2)   Worlding classic detective fiction – to what degree is Chandler’s reading accurate? Does it hold when this sub-genre is taken up by authors writing outside the British-American norm, either in languages other than English or writers from peripheral English (Australia, Canada, Ghana, India, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, etc.) contexts.

3)   The relationship between readers and international texts. How do readers experience the world of crime fiction when reading from afar? How important is “the locus where the fixed foot of the compass that describes the globalizing circumscription is placed” (Kadir 2)? In what ways does a global consciousness emerge through the interaction between readers and international texts? Is the location of the reader as important as the origin of the text?

Potential participants are encouraged to contact the organisers before submitting abstracts through the ACLA portal.

Seminar Organisers: 

Stewart King, Monash University: stewart.king@monash.edu

Jesper Gulddal, University of Newcastle: jesper.gulddal@newcastle.edu.au

Alistair Rolls, University of Newcastle: alistair.rolls@newcastle.edu.au

Deadline for abstracts is 11:59 PM Pacific Time on 23rd September.

Malice Domestic - Agatha Award Winners

Malice Domestic announced the Agatha Award Winners on Sunday 1^st May 2016.

Congratulations to all! The full list of nominees can be found here!

Best Contemporary Novel

Long Upon the Land by Margaret Maron (Grand Central Publishing)

Best Historical Novel

Dreaming Spies by Laurie R. King (Bantam)

Best First Novel

On the Road with Del and Louise by Art Taylor (Henery Press)

Best Non-Fiction
The Golden Age of Murder: The Mystery of the Writers Who Invented the Modern Detective Story by Martin Edwards (HarperCollins)

Best Short Story,

“A Year Without Santa Claus?”  by Barb Goffman (AHMM)

Best Children’s/Young Adult

Andi Unstoppable  by Amanda Flower (Zonderkidz) -

2016 Bony Blithe Award nominees

The five finalists for this year’s Bloody Words Light Mystery Award – the annual Canadian award that celebrates traditional, feel-good mysteries have been announced and the nominees are …

The Marsh Madness by Victoria Abbott (Berkley Prime Crime)
Untimely Death by Elizabeth J. Duncan (Crooked Lane)
Booked for Trouble by Eva Gates (NAL)
White Colander Crime by Victoria Hamilton (Berkley Prime Crime)
Encore by Alexis Koetting (Five Star)

The 2016 Bony Blithe Award will be presented during a gala affair to be held on Friday 27^th at the High Park Club, Toronto, Canada.

Congratulations to all of the nominated authors!

Agatha Award Results

The Agatha Awards were given out recently.  These prizes, honouring “traditional mysteries” (those without explicit sex scenes, excessive gore, or unnecessary violence) were handed out during a banquet earlier this evening at the 27th annual Malice Domestic Conference, which is held the weekend of 1 - 3 May 2015 in Bethesda, Maryland.

*Winners

Best Contemporary: 

*Truth Be Told, by Hank Phillippi Ryan (Forge)
The Good, the Bad, and the Emus, by Donna Andrews (Minotaur); 

A Demon Summer, by G.M. Malliet (Minotaur); 

The Long Way Home, by Louise Penny (Minotaur);

Designated Daughters, by Margaret Maron (Grand Central)

Best Historical Novel: 

*Queen of Hearts, by Rhys Bowen (Berkley)
Hunting Shadows, by Charles Todd (Morrow); 

An Unwilling Accomplice, by Charles Todd (Morrow); 

Wouldn’t It Be Deadly, by D.E. Ireland (Minotaur);

Murder in Murray Hill, by Victoria Thompson (Berkley)

Best First Novel: 

*Well Read, Then Dead, by Terrie Farley 
Moran (Berkley)
Circle of Influence, by Annette Dashofy (Henery Press); 

Tagged for Death, by Sherry Harris (Kensington); 

Finding Sky, by Susan O’Brien (Henery Press); 

Murder Strikes a Pose, by Tracy Weber (Midnight Ink)

Best Non-fiction: 

*Writes of Passage: Adventures on the Writer’s Journey, edited by Hank Phillippi Ryan (Henery Press)
400 Things Cops Know: Street-Smart Lessons from a Veteran Patrolman, by Adam Plantinga (Quill Driver); 

Death Dealer: How Cops and Cadaver Dogs Brought a Killer to Justice, by Kate Flora (New Horizon Press); 

The Art of the English Murder, by Lucy Worsley (Pegasus);

The Poisoner: The Life and Crimes of Victorian England’s Most Notorious Doctor, by Stephen Bates (Overlook)

Best Short Story: 

*“The Odds Are Against Us,” by Art Taylor (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, November 2014)
“Premonition,” by Art Taylor (from Chesapeake Crimes: Homicidal Holidays, edited by Barb Goffman and Marcia Talley; Wildside Press);

“The Shadow Knows,” by Barb Goffman (from Chesapeake Crimes: Homicidal Holidays);

“Just Desserts for Johnny,” by Edith Maxwell (Kings River Life Magazine, January 4, 2014);

“The Blessing Witch,” by Kathy Lynn Emerson (from Best New England Crime Stories 2015: Rogue Wave, edited by Mark Ammons, Katherine Fast, Barbara Ross, and Leslie Wheeler; Level Best)

Best Children’s/Young Adult: 

*The Code Buster’s Club, Case #4, The Mummy’s Curse, by Penny Warner (Egmont USA)
Andi Under Pressure, by Amanda Flower (ZonderKidz);

Greenglass House, by Kate Milford (Clarion); 

Uncertain Glory, by Lea Wait (Islandport Press);

Found, by Harlan Coben (Putnam Juvenile)

In addition, Sara Paretsky was presented with Malice Domestic’s Lifetime Achievement Award for her many contributions to the mystery-fiction genre.

Congratulations to all the winners!

The Newly Discovered Diaries of Doctor Kristal according to Russell James

Russell James is a British writer whose first books were hard-hitting, low-life thrillers, mainly set in south east London.  Later he added non-fiction, historical and other novels to his repertoire, and to date he has written ten crime novels, four historical novels and one more personal novel, along with short stories and four biographical encyclopaedias.  (He was also a main contributing editor to Harcourt’s Encyclopaedia of British Crime Writing.)  In 2001 he was elected Chairman of the Crime Writers Association.

As a crime writer Russell was named by GQ magazine as ‘the great unknown talent of British crime writing’, by Ian Rankin as ‘the Godfather of British Noir’ and by the Times as ‘surely the best of Britain's darker crime writers’.

After several years writing in different genres he has now returned to crime with what at first sight appears to be, but as it turns out is not a more traditional tale, The Newly Discovered Diaries of Doctor Kristal (subtitled: whose Strange Obsessions caused him to Murder some annoying patients).

Shots:  That’s a mouthful of a title!

RJ:   Yes, it’s long – but why not?  It’s my first crime book for five years, and I had lots to say!

Shots:  It’s not the kind we would expect from you.

RJ:   Not even set in London!  No, it was time for a breakaway, I guess, though the book still has more than a touch of British noir.  It is, I hope, a wry and somewhat outrageous psychological crime story, and I’ve chosen to tell it in diary form, the diary having been written in secret by the prissy and pedantic Doctor Kristal, a 35 year old virgin –

Shots:  A virgin – at 35?

RJ:   He is not, shall we say, a normal man – and sex, or rather, his 35 years without it is what stirs up the strange obsessions which lead him to start murdering his patients.

Shots:  Hardly a normal doctor!  Harold Shipman, perhaps?

RJ:   Any resemblance . . .  No, my doctor is quite different, based on no one you could identify – I hope.

Shots:  And why does he –

RJ:   Oh, his intentions are strictly honourable!  He only wants to help.  Among his patients, you see, is an attractive young 19-year-old, grateful for some help he gave before but now saddled with an unwanted pregnancy.  (This is 1963, remember.)  Then there’s the beautiful Eleanor, something of a hypochondriac and unhappily married to a sexually voracious and overweening actor more than a decade older than her.  Another woman faces a more unpleasant dilemma, and it’s in helping her that the doctor finds himself in hot water.

Shots:  You’ve set the novel in 1963. Why?

RJ:   It was a tumultuous time – the year when ‘sex was discovered’ supposedly, which makes his virgin state all the more peculiar.  In the background lies the Profumo affair and the assassination of President Kennedy and, against these, Doctor Kristal’s provincial life may seem of little significance –

Shots:  Not to his victims!

RJ:   No, and unfortunately, although he means well, none of his solutions go to plan.  People get in the way – like, there are two other doctors in the town, and they both have plans for Doctor Kristal.  His own plans are . . . a little wacky, shall we say?

Shots:  Does he get away with it?

RJ:   Oh, come on – you want the end of the book?  Whether he does or not is not the main point; the fun comes in seeing how his obsessions gradually take him over – which he can’t see but you can – and how his devious schemes pan out.

Shots:  We’ve had to wait 5 years for this.

RJ:   Well, I do have an excuse!  In these interim years I’ve written those 4 biographical picture books, 2 historical novels and a modern-day straightforward one (Exit 39).  So I haven’t been idle.  You can, of course, get all the background on my website, http://prosperobooks.wordpress.com/ or take a look at the Kindle version of the book itself at http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00LWH9R4U

You can also find out more about Russell James and his books on his website.  Russell can also be found on Facebook and you can follow him on Twitter @getRussellJames