2014 Arthur Ellis Awards Shortlists and CWC Grand Master Award

Crime Writers of Canada announced the 2014 Arthur Ellis Awards Shortlists, and the winner of the CWC Grand Master Award for Crime Writing in Canada.

This is the inaugural year of the CWC Grand Master Award, intended to recognize Canadian crime writers who have a substantial body of work that has garnered national and international recognition.

This year’s winner of the CWC Grand Master Award is Howard Engel, the author of the award winning Benny Cooperman detective series. A mainstay of the Canadian crime writing scene for many years, Mr. Engel helped put Canadian crime writing on the map at a time when few mysteries were set in this country.

Excellence in Crime Writing Best Novel
Walls of a Mind by Jon Brooke (Signature Editions)

The Devil’s Making by Seán Haldane (Stone Flower Press)

Presto Variations by Lee Lamothe (Dundurn)
Miss Montreal by Howard Shrier (Vintage Canada)

An Inquiry into Love and Death by Simone St. James (Penguin Books)

Best First Novel
Almost Criminal by E.R. Brown (Dundurn)

The Silent Wife by A.S.A. Harrison (Penguin Books Canada)
Hot Sinatra by Axel Howerton (Evolved Publishing)
Messum, Bait by J Kent (Penguin Canada)
Die on Your Feet by S.G Wong (Carina Press)

Best Novella,

The Goddaughter’s Revenge by Melodie Campbell (Orca Books)

My Sister’s Keeper by Brenda Chapman (Grassroots Press)

A Woman Scorned by James Heneghan (Orca Books 1)

Best Short Story 
Watermelon Weekend by Donna Carrick in Thirteen, (Carrick Publishing),

Under Cap Ste. Claire by Jas. R. Petrin in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, October 2013, (Dell Magazines)
Footprints in Water by Twist Phelan in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, July 2013, (Dell Magazines)

The Emerald Skull by Sylvia Maultash Warsh in Thirteen (Carrick Publishing)

The Third Echo by Sam Wiebe in Girl Trouble: Malfeasance Occasional, (MacMillan/St Martin’s Press)

Best Book in French 

Saccages by Chrystine Brouillet (La courte échelle),

Et à l'heure de votre mort by Jacques Côté (éditions Alire)

L’enfant promis by Maureen Martineau (La courte échelle)

Le fils emprunté by Jacques Savoie (Éditions Libre Expression)

Best Juvenile/YA 

Apparition by Gail Gallant, (Doubleday Canada)
Bones Never Lie: How Forensics Helps Solve History’s Mysteries by Elizabeth MacLeod (Annick Press)

Who I’m Not by Ted Staunton (Orca Books)

Unhanged Arthur 

Death at the Iron House Lodge by L.J. Gordon

Cold Girl by Rachel Greenaway

The Snow Job by Charlotte Morganti

Descent by Kristina Stanley

Coiled by Kevin Thornton

Crime Writers of Canada was founded in 1982 as a professional organisation designed to raise the profile of Canadian crime writers from coast to coast. Members include authors, publishers, editors, booksellers, librarians, reviewers, and literary agents as well as many developing authors.

In Memoriam James Melville

James Melville (aka Roy Peter Martin and Hampton Charles)

January 5^th 1931 - 20th March 2014

It is with deep sadness that Shots reports the death of Roy Peter Martin, better known to crime fiction fans as James Melville and Hampton Charles, who passed on 23rd March, aged 83, only weeks before his most famous crime series, the novel featuring Japanese policeman Superintendent Otani, was to be brought back into print by Ostara Crime, after a gap of more than thirty years.

Roy Peter Martin was born in London in 1931.  He read philosophy at Birkbeck College and after National Service in the RAF worked in local government and then entered teaching.  In 1960 he became a British Council Officer and thereafter his career was in cultural diplomacy and educational development in Indonesia, Japan and Hungary.  In 1979 he returned to Japan as Head of the British Council and began to write the Superintendent Otani series of crime novels which “provided a vivid and multi-stranded portrait of Japanese society, caught between its traditional (and often hidebound) past and the exigencies of modern life”.  He also wrote historical novels set in Japan and spy novels which drew on his experiences in Indonesia and Hungary.

Under the pen name Hampton Charles, he continued the ‘Miss Seeton’ series of stories (gentle parodies of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple books) originally written by Heron

Carvic (1913-1980).  He was also a noted reviewer of crime fiction for the Hampstead & Highgate Express and a member of the Detection Club.

Series editor for Ostara Crime, Mike Ripley, writes: ‘I knew James/Peter primarily as a reviewer and in particular a very generous reviewer of my own early novels.  After a gap of twenty or so years, I found myself in a position to bring his excellent Japanese mysteries back into print and James/Peter seemed delighted at the prospect.  It is truly depressing that he was not to live to see his books back in print – and as eBooks for the very first time.  He was a gentle reviewer and a fine writer who used his extensive experience of Japan to shed light on Japanese culture and society by showing how the Japanese dealt with foreigners and all things foreign.  That was a difficult trick, but James Melville pulled it off.’

Ostara Publishing are to release new Ostara Crime editions of James Melville’s first three ‘Otani’ novels: The Wages of Zen, The Chrysanthemum Chain and A Sort of Samurai.  Further details on: www.ostarapublishing.co.uk.

Crimefest Award Nominees Announced

The winners of the CRIMEFEST awards will be announced during the Gala Dinner on Saturday, 17 May. The organisers would like to thank the sponsors and congratulates all the shortlisted nominees and their publishers.

Audible Sounds Of Crime Award

The Audible Sounds of Crime Award is for the best unabridged crime audiobook first published in the UK in 2013 in both printed and audio formats, and available for download from audible.co.uk, Britain’s largest provider of downloadable audiobooks. Courtesy of sponsor Audible UK, the winning author and audiobook reader share the £1,000 prize equally.

Nominees:

Broken Homes by Ben Aaronovitch, read by Kobna Holdbrook-Smith (Orion Audio)

A Delicate Truth by John le Carré, read by John le Carré (Penguin)

The Cuckoo's Calling by Robert Galbraith, read by Robert Glenister (Hachette Audio)

Dead Man’s Time by Peter James, read by Daniel Weyman (Macmillan Audio)

The Chessmen by Peter James, read by Peter Forbes (Quercus)

Natural Causes by James Oswald , read by Ian Hanmore (Penguin)

  

Eligible titles were submitted by publishers for the longlist, and Audible UK listeners established the shortlist and the winning title.

eDunnit Award

The eDunnit Award is for the best crime fiction ebook first published in both hardcopy and in electronic format in the British Isles in 2013. The winning author receives £500 and a Bristol Blue Glass commemorative award.

Nominees:

The Beauty of Murder by A.K. Benedict  (Orion)

Sandrine by Thomas H Cook (Head of Zeus)

Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway by Sara Gran (Faber and Faber)

Under a Silent Moon by Elizabeth Haynes (Sphere)

Cross and Burn by Val McDermid (Sphere)

Norwegian by Night by Derek B Miller (Faber and Faber)

The Red Road by Denise Mina (Orion)

Sign of the Cross by Thomas Mogford(Bloomsbury)

The Double by George Pelecanos (Orion)

The Feast of Artemis by Anne Zouroudi (Bloomsbury)

Eligible titles were submitted by publishers for the longlist, and a team of British crime fiction reviewers voted to establish the shortlist and the winning title.

Goldsboro Last Laugh Award

The Goldsboro Last Laugh Award is for the best humorous crime novel first published in the British Isles in 2013. The £500 prize is sponsored by Goldsboro Books, the UKs largest specialist in first edition, signed books.

Nominees:

Fire and Brimstone by Colin Bateman(Headline)

Speaking from Among the Bones by Alan Bradley (Orion)

The Axe Factor by Colin Cotterill (Quercus)

Calamitous Chinese Killing by Shamini Flint (Little, Brown)

Bad Monkey by Carl Hiaasen (Little, Brown)

A Little Murder by Suzette A Hill (Allison & Busby)

Norwegian by Night by Derek B Miller (Faber and Faber)

The Sound of One Hand Killing by Teresa Solona (Bitter Lemon Press)

Eligible titles were submitted by publishers for the longlist, and a team of British crime fiction reviewers voted to establish the shortlist and the winning title.

All the winners also receive a Bristol Blue Glass commemorative award.

Peter Quinn on The Thrill of the Trilogy

Peter Quinn is the author of Hour of the Cat and The Man Who Never Returned the first two books in the Fintan Dunne trilogy.  He has participated as a guest commentator in several PBS documentaries, including the Academy Award-nominated film, “The Passion of Sister Rose”.  He was an advisor on Martin Scorsese’s film “Gangs of New York”. 

My introduction to the triune came early.  Each morning as my classmates and I made the sign of the cross, my first-grade nun stressed that the Trinity--one God in three separate and distinct persons, Father, Son and Holy Ghost--was essential to our faith and, ergo, to our salvation.  Since my six-year-old brain couldn’t make much sense of it, I was happy to be told the three-person God was a mystery beyond human understanding and had almost driven mad the theologians who’d tried to solve it.

Still, it stuck.  Three in one, one in three. The holy trifecta. In the large stained glass window on the south wall of our Bronx parish church, St. Patrick held up a shamrock.  One stem, three petals: They glowed a single emerald green as the sun lofted behind them.  For that moment at least, the riddle of the Trinity ceased to bewilder.

Over the years, as I wandered amid the thickets of secularity, I learned that, as well as a marker of religious dogma, three brought to whatever it was associated with a special aura, whether exciting (Triple Crown), silly (Three Stooges), erotic (ménage à trois), scary (Third Reich), exceptional (triple play), or sad (strike three).  Just by being three, ordinary things gained a special cachet.

When I set out to become a writer of books, I imagined one would suffice.  A historian manqué, just shy of a Ph.D., I first stumbled into speech writing.  I decided to try it for a year, save enough to go back to school, finish the dissertation, and turn it into a book.  “The best-laid schemes o' mice and men”, 
as Scottish poet Robert Burns put it “gang aft agley”.  I ended up scribbling for two New York governors and five chairmen of Time Inc./Time Warner across a span of three decades.

On the plus side, my job involved indoor work and required no manual labour.  It paid the mortgage and tuitions, and included a defined benefit plan; on the minus, it was frequently stressful, sometimes grinding, and always anonymous.  Occasionally a speechwriter or two has slipped from behind the curtain and gained fame crafting words for mouths other than his/her own.  But as I saw it, once you take the king’s shilling, you do the king’s bidding, and whatever praise or blame ensues is the sovereign’s alone.

As time went on, I felt a growing need to put my name on words I could publicly claim as mine.  I got to my office two hours early in order to attempt a novel.  Having grown used to churning out large chunks of copy in short amounts of time, I calculated I’d have a finished manuscript in a year or two.  Robert Burns proved right again.  Ten years later, I left the delivery room cradling my long-gestating mind child, Banished Children of Eve, a six-hundred-page saga of Civil War New York.

The first agent I submitted it to was dismissive.  I hadn’t written one novel, she wrote, but

“sausaged three in one”.  I was stung.  Yet the more I thought about it, the more I realized its truth.  My novel was the story of Irish famine immigrants, the frightening, fecund mongrel world of mid-19th-century New York, and the impact of the Civil War.  These were the three petals.  Minstrel-songster Stephen Foster was stem and sausage skin.  His music is the book’s leitmotiv.  There are worse things to be accused of, I decided, than being a Trinitarian.  I stuck with three in one, and that’s how it was published.

I drew a great deal of satisfaction from at last having my name on writing all my own, so much so that I decided one wasn’t enough.  I had other stories I wanted to write.  Faced by commercial constraints as well as those of my own mortality, I knew the next had to be shorter.  Unfortunately, hard as I tried, I couldn’t get the hang of the short form, which required the precision of the pointillist.  I preferred the Jackson Pollack School, buckets of paint splashed across expansive canvases.

With the second novel, I decided to reverse the first: In place of three packed in one, one would be divided in three.  The stem I started with was Fintan Dunne, Irish-American ex-cop and private eye, a veteran of World Wars I and II, whose formal education ended in the Catholic Protectory, an orphanage cum reformatory in the Bronx.  In hardboiled style, Fin is a man who, if he ever had any illusions about human nature, had them kicked out of him so long ago he can’t remember what they were.

Fin is what the writer William Kennedy calls a “cynical humanist”.  Distrustful of all authority, sceptical of most causes, uninterested in heroics, he is reluctant to get involved.  Whatever the case, he knows from the outset that there are no perfect endings, no spotless souls, and that some mysteries are better left unsolved.  Still, despite his understanding of the futility of good intentions and the hopeless fallibility of everyone--including himself--Fin can’t help but try to see that some modicum of justice is done.  

I followed Fin as he fought with eugenicists and fifth columnists (Hour of the Cat), wrestled with the still-unsolved case of New York’s most-famous missing jurist (The Man Who Never Returned), and burrowed into the Cold War’s intricate machinations and betrayals (Dry Bones).  I’ve seen the city and the world through his eyes as he experienced two world wars, the Great Depression and the gloom-and-boom of the Eisenhower era, the rollercoaster years W.H. Auden accurately labelled “The Age of Anxiety”.

I’m grateful for our three-legged journey.  Fintan has been great company every step of the way.  Now that we finished our last caper and said our goodbyes, I’m hopeful that I’ve told his story the way he wanted it told, and that the three tales together--separate and distinct yet parts of the same whole--capture him in a jaded emerald glow.

You can find out more information about Peter Quinn and his work on his website and on his blog. You can also find him on Facebook.

Dry Bones is out now (£16.99, Duckworth)