CWA Unveil 2019 Dagger Shortlist

The author behind one of the biggest shows on TV, a world renowned forensic anthropologist and the son of ‘the godfather of tartan noir’ have been shortlisted for the prestigious CWA Dagger awards.

The ten Daggers awarded annually by the CWA are regarded by the publishing world as the foremost British awards for crime-writing.

Luke Jennings is shortlisted for the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger for No Tomorrow, a Sunday Times thriller of the month and the basis for the major BBC TV series Killing Eve starring Sandra Oh and Jodie Comer.

Professor Sue Black, who was awarded an OBE for her international human identification work on mass graves, makes the CWA ALCS Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction for All That Remains. Black is also the expert forensics adviser to the ‘Queen of Crime’ Val McDermid.

The CWA Sapere Books Historical Dagger sees Liam McIlvanney in the running for The

Quaker, which has already won the 2018 McIlvanney Prize, named in honour of his father the godfather of tartan noir, William McIllvanney. He’s up against CJ Sansom with his acclaimed Shardlake series and the award-winning Abir Mukherjee for Smoke and Ashes, the third novel in his historical crime series set in Calcutta.

The world-famous Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) Daggers, which honour the very best in crime writing, are the oldest awards in the genre. Created in 1955, the CWA Daggers have been synonymous with quality crime writing for over half a century.

The award-winning poet, Claire Askew, has been shortlisted for two Daggers for her debut novel All the Hidden Truths hailed by The Times as a ‘thought-provoking’ entry into crime fiction. Askew is in contention for the CWA John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger - given to the best crime novel by a first-time author. She’s up against Laura Shepherd-Robinson’s Blood and Sugar, hailed by the Financial Times as ‘a novel of astonishing skill.’

Askew is also in the running for the CWA Gold Dagger – the award for the best crime novel, alongside M W Craven with The Puppet Show. Craven served in the armed forces and became a probation officer before crediting the CWA Debut Dagger competition in 2013 for giving him a career as an author. Craven said: “I can draw a direct evolutionary line from being shortlisted in 2013 to the two book deal I signed with Little, Brown in January 2017. Being on the shortlist opened a door.”

The 2019 Debut Dagger competition sees five unknown and uncontracted writers shortlisted.   Linda Stratmann, Chair of the Crime Writers’ Association, said: “The Daggers are unparalleled for their longevity and reputation. Receiving a Dagger award is a something of a holy grail for authors. The CWA prides itself on supporting crime authors by not just recognising established names but as a platform for debut novelists and emerging writers.”

UK Libraries whittled down six crime authors for the prestigious Dagger in the Library prize.  M C Beaton, Mark Billingham, John Connolly, Kate Ellis, C J Sansom and Cath Staincliffe are all nominees, selected by librarians and chosen for their body of work and support of libraries.

The winners will be announced at the Dagger Award ceremony at the Grange City Hotel, London, on 24 October - widely considered as the crime writing event of the year.

Tickets are now available for the Dagger Awards gala dinner. Guest speaker on the night is the writer, broadcaster, dramatist and journalist Lynn Truss, famed for Eats, Shoots and Leaves alongside her comic crime novel, A Shot in the Dark. The night is compered by one of the UK’s leading experts on crime fiction, Barry Forshaw.

The Daggers also honour those working in short story form, as well as specific awards for international titles. One of the UK’s most prominent societies for the promotion and promulgation of crime writing, the CWA was founded in 1953 by John Creasy; the awards started in 1955 with its first award going to Winston Graham, best known for Poldark.

On the night, Robert Goddard will also be presented with the 2019 Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement, the highest honour in British crime writing. His 28th novel, One False Move (Bantam Press), was published in February.

Robert Goddard said: “I’m greatly honoured to be this year’s CWA Diamond Dagger recipient, particularly since it’s an award conferred by my fellow writers, who know about the challenges of the craft from the inside.”

 

2019 CWA DAGGER SHORTLISTS IN FULL:

CWA GOLD DAGGER

All the Hidden Truths by Claire Askew (Hodder & Stoughton)

The Puppet Show by M W Craven (Constable)

What We Did by Christobel Kent (Sphere)

Unto Us a Son is Given by Donna Leon (William Heinemann)

American by Day by Derek B Miller (Doubleday)

A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better by Benjamin Wood (Scribner)

 

CWA JOHN CREASEY (NEW BLOOD)

All the Hidden Truths by Claire Askew (Hodder & Stoughton)

The Boy at the Door by Alex Dahl (Head Of Zeus)

Scrublands by Chris Hammer (Wildfire)

Turn a Blind Eye by Vicky Newham (HQ)

Blood and Sugar by Laura Shepherd-Robinson (Mantle)

Overkill by Vanda Symon (Orenda)

 

CWA ALCS GOLD DAGGER FOR NON-FICTION

All That Remains by Sue Black (Doubleday)

An Unexplained Death by Mikita Brottman (Canongate)

Murder by the Book by Claire Harman (Viking)

The Feather Thief by Kirk Wallace Johnson (Hutchinson)

The Spy and the Traitor by Ben Macintyre (Viking)

The Five by Hallie Rubenhold (Doubleday)

 

CWA IAN FLEMING STEEL DAGGER

Give Me Your Hand by Megan Abbott (Picador)

Safe Houses by Dan Fesperman (Head of Zeus)

No Tomorrow by Luke Jennings (John Murray)

Lives Laid by Stephen Mack Jones (Soho Crime)

To the Lions by Holly Watt (Bloomsbury)

Memo from Turner by Tim Willocks (Jonathan Cape)

 

CWA SAPERE BOOKS HISTORICAL DAGGER

The Quaker by Liam McIlvanney (Harper Fiction)

Destroying Angel by S G MacLean (Quercus Fiction)

Smoke and Ashes by Abir Mukherjee (Harvill Secker)

The House on Half Moon Street by Alex Reeve (Raven Books)

Tombland by C J Sansom (Mantle)

Blood and Sugar by Laura Shepherd-Robinson (Mantle)

 

CWA INTERNATIONAL DAGGER

A Long Night in Paris by Dov Alfon tr Daniella Zamir (Maclehose Press)

Weeping Waters by Karin Brynard tr Maya Fowler & Isobel Dixon (World Noir)

The Cold Summer by Gianrico Carofiglio, tr Howard Curtis (Bitter Lemon Press)

Newcomer by Keigo Higashino, tr Giles Murray (Little, Brown)

The Root of Evil by Håkan Nesser, tr Sarah Death (Mantle)

The Forger by Cay Rademacher, tr Peter Millar (Arcadia Books)

 

CWA SHORT STORY DAGGER

Strangers in a Pub by Martin Edwards in ‘Ten Year Stretch’ edited by Martin Edwards and Adrian Muller (No Exit Press)

Death Becomes Her by Syd Moore in ‘The Strange Casebook’ by Syd Moore (Point Blank Books)

The Dummies’ Guide to Serial Killing by Danuta Reah* in ‘The Dummies’ Guide to Serial Killing and other Fantastic Female Fables’ (Fantastic Books)

I Detest Mozart by Teresa Solana in ‘The First Historic Serial Killers and Other Stories’ by Teresa Solana (Bitter Lemon Press)

Bag Man by Lavie Tidhar in ‘The Outcast Hours’ edited by Mahvesh Murad and Jared Shurin (Solaris)

 *Danuta Kot writing as Danuta Reah.

 

DAGGER IN THE LIBRARY

M C Beaton

Mark Billingham

John Connolly

Kate Ellis

C J Sansom

Cath Staincliffe

 

DEBUT DAGGER

(A competition for the opening of a crime novel by an uncontracted writer)

Wake by Shelley Burr:

The Mourning Light by Jerry Crause

Hardways by Catherine Hendricks                                                                           

The Firefly by David Smith

A Thin Sharp Blade by Fran Smith

 

DIAMOND DAGGER       

Presented to Robert Goddard.                 

 

"Ripped" from the Headlines -- Fifty Years Later

 Laura Lippman is the multiple award-winning best-selling author of (currently) twelve books in the acclaimed private investigator Tess Monaghan series and now eleven New York Times bestselling standalone novels. Her most recent book published in the UK is The Lady in the Lake (Faber &Faber). She has won numerous awards for her writing including the Anthony, Edgar®, Shamus, Macavity, Nero, Barry and Agatha Awards to name a few! Her books are published all over the world to great acclaim.  

I grew up in a newspaper family, the daughter of an editorial writer at The Sun, as the Baltimore morning newspaper was known then. The Sun was a grand old institution, with a noted Washington bureau and foreign bureaus. Its sister paper, the Evening Sun, was slightly more raucous, as afternoon newspapers tended to in the 1960s. But it had the better comics page by far and I was often the first person in the family to grab it from the sidewalk. 

The year I turned 10, a terrifying murder made headlines. A girl not much older than I had disappeared on her way home from school. Her body was found in a vacant lot a few days later. The crime was solved quickly, thanks to a detail that would have been at home in the forensic-driven television dramas of today: A sandy substance, one not indigenous to Maryland, was found on her body. It was something used in aquariums and that led to the man, a tropical fish store clerk, who had murdered her. The killer remains in a Maryland prison to this day. 

Another twenty-plus years would go by before I learned about another tragic death in 1969. A woman's body was found in the fountain at the large, manmade lake near the park that houses Baltimore's zoo. She had been missing for weeks, but that wasn't news. And even the discovery of her body, strange as it was -- the cause of her death was never determined, so her death wasn't even officially a homicide -- didn't make news. The woman, Shirley Parker, was African-American. My colleague, David Michael Ettlin, dubbed her "Lady in the Lake" and included the story on the "crime tour" he sometimes gave new reporters. 

If Americans can agree on anything these days, it's that the presidential election of 2016 was extremely emotional, its outcome unexpected. Baffled and disturbed by my country's present-day situation, I couldn't see how to write a novel set in contemporary times. So I looked to the past. Embedded in my own detective series was this nugget: Tess Monaghan's parents had met while working as volunteers on the 1966 governor's race in Maryland. A quasi family member, Spike, had been convicted of a felony that prohibited from having a bar license. Strange as it may sound, I was never quite sure what Spike had done. Maybe it was time to find out. 

"Does it have to be about Tess's parents?" my long-time editor, Carrie Feron, asked over lunch. I wasn't sure if the question was an open-ended one or a gentle nudge toward doing a stand-alone. But it opened my mind to all the possibilities inherent in a 1966 crime novel. I found myself imagining a story in which two deaths, very similar to those 1969 ones described above, would be linked. 

Only what would link them? I didn't want to write some big coinkydinky novel in which a serial killer roamed the city, protected by a vast conspiracy. It has always been my tendency to create human-scale stories, where the stakes seem small to everyone but the players. What would connect the high-profile murder of a child and the quickly forgotten death of a black woman? 

Meet Madeline Morgenstern Schwartz. If you know Marjorie Morningstar, you will recognize her as an homage, down to her maiden name and married name. But unlike the eponymous heroine of Herman Wouk's 1955 novel, she yearned to be a writer, not an actress, an ambition that is reawakened by a series of chance encounters when she is 37. She finds the body of a murdered 11-year-old, then leverages that discovery for a clerical job at the evening newspaper. To break in as a reporter, Maddie needs another big story. She decides the "Lady in the Lake" is her ticket. But the "lady," a cynical young ghost keeping tabs on Maddie's investigation, is not pleased. 

It always sounds woo-woo to say this, but so much of the novel was unknown to me when I started. I didn't know it would be a newspaper novel. I didn't aniticpate the first voice heard would be a ghost's. I didn't realize a chorus of other voices, all the people seen and yet not seen by the heat-seeking missile that is Maddie Schwartz, would join in. And, lo and behold, there were also Tess Monaghan Easter eggs for the readers who have been reading me for the past 20 years. Here is Tess's mother, working in her brother's jewelry store. She introduces Maddie to Tess's uncle, a closeted gay man with a job in the Maryland legislature. And, finally, there is Spike. All of these people bounce off Maddie Morgenstern, interesting to her primarily as the means to an end. 

Just this morning, a reader tweeted that she was sorry to say goodbye to Maddie when the book was over. I know the feeling. But I'm not sure I've said goodbye to her. In some ways, Madeline Morgenstern Schwartz -- born in 1929, a libertine disguised as a suburban Jewish housewife, a woman whose ambition makes her careless and selectively curious -- is the most autobiographical character I have written to date.  

The Lady in the Lake by Laura Lippman (Faber & Faber) Published on 25 July 2019 (£12.99)

Cleo Sherwood disappeared eight months ago. Aside from her parents and the two sons she left behind, no one seems to have noticed. It isn't hard to understand why: it's 1964 and neither the police, the public nor the papers care much when Negro women go missing. Maddie Schwartz - recently separated from her husband, working her first job as an assistant at the Baltimore Sun- wants one thing: a byline. When she hears about an unidentified body that's been pulled out of the fountain in Druid Hill Park, Maddie thinks she is about to uncover a story that will finally get her name in print. What she can't imagine is how much trouble she will cause by chasing a story that no-one wants her to tell.

 More information about Laura and her work can be found on her website.

Winner of 2019 Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Unmasked

Steve Cavanagh has been unmasked as the winner of The Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award for 2019.

Now in its fifteenth year, the Award is considered the most coveted crime writing prizes in the country, and one that receives substantial interest from authors, publishers, booksellers and fans of the genre in equal measures.

Thirteen is the Lisburn author’s fifth book in the Eddie Flynn series of crime thrillers, serving up a delicious twist to the traditional courtroom thriller, where in this instance the real killer is not the one on trial, but a member of the jury!

Cavanagh was presented the award by title sponsor Simon Theakston at the event hosted by broadcaster Mark Lawson at the opening night of the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, staged by Harrogate International Festivals in the Old Swan Hotel, Harrogate.

He was one six shortlisted authors vying for the title from an original longlist of 18 crime novels, published by UK and Irish authors, available in paperback from May 1, 2018 to April 30, 2019.

The 2019 Award is supported by title sponsor T&R Theakston Ltd, WHSmith, 

and The Mail on Sunday.

He collected a £3,000 cash prize, as well as a handmade, engraved oak beer cask crafted by the coopers at Theakston’s Masham brewery.

The winner was decided by the panel of judges, comprising of literary and media figures chaired this year by Mari Hannah, alongside a public vote.

A special presentation was also made to James Patterson - the winner of the tenth Theakston Old Peculier Outstanding Contribution to Crime Fiction Award.

James Patterson - whose books have sold in excess of 300 million copies and has been the most-borrowed author of adult fiction in UK libraries for the past 11 years in a row - joins John Grisham, Lee Child, Val McDermid, Sara Paretsky, Lynda La Plante, Ruth Rendell, PD James, Colin Dexter and Reginald Hill as recipients of the Award.

Simon Theakston, title sponsor and executive director of T&R Theakston Ltd, said: “It is always a privilege to present the winning author with their richly-deserved award. As ever, the standard of both the short and long lists has been astonishingly high, and it is never an easy task to choose a winner.”

Simon Theakston added: “James Patterson is a literary giant and it was an absolute honour to present him with the Theakston Old Peculier Outstanding Contribution to Crime Fiction Award. “James is as passionate about reading as he is about writing and is a huge supporter of independent bookstores and libraries.

“We are delighted that he is joining us here in Harrogate for a few days, and I’m sure many budding crime writers will draw inspiration from his very presence.”

This year’s Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival - Europe’s biggest celebration of the genre - continues until Sunday at the Old Swan Hotel, Harrogate.

Special Guests this year include Jeffery Deaver, Harlan Coben, Ian Rankin, Jo Nesbo, MC Beaton, Stuart MacBride, Val McDermid, Jed Mercurio, Nicola Sturgeon, Belinda Bauer and Eva Dolan. 2019’s programme is chaired by Mari Hannah.

The shortlist in full:

Belinda Bauer – Snap 

Snap is a gripping novel about a teenage boy’s hunt for his mother’s killer. Jack’s in charge, said his mother as she disappeared up the road to get help. I won’t be long. Now eleven-year-old Jack and his two sisters wait on the hard shoulder in their stifling, broken-down car, bickering and whining and playing I-Spy until she comes back. But their mother doesn’t come back. She never comes back.

Steve Cavanagh – Thirteen

Murder wasn't the hard part. It was just the start of the game. Joshua Kane has been preparing for this moment his whole life. He's done it before. But this is the big one. This is the murder trial of the century. And Kane has killed to get the best seat in the house. But there's someone on his tail. Someone who suspects that the killer isn't the man on trial. Kane knows time is running out - he just needs to get to the conviction without being discovered.

Mick Herron – London Rules

London Rules might not be written down, but everyone knows rule one. Cover your arse. Regent's Park's First Desk, Claude Whelan, is learning this the hard way. Tasked with protecting a beleaguered prime minister, he's facing attack from all directions himself: from the showboating MP who orchestrated the Brexit vote, and now has his sights set on Number Ten; from the showboat's wife, a tabloid columnist, who's crucifying Whelan in print; and especially from his own deputy, Lady Di Taverner, who's alert for Claude's every stumble. Meanwhile, the country's being rocked by an apparently random string of terror attacks, and someone's trying to kill Roddy Ho.

Val McDermid – Broken Ground

Six feet under in a Highland peat bog lies Alice Somerville’s inheritance, buried by her grandfather at the end of World War II. But when Alice finally uncovers it, she finds an unwanted surprise—a body with a bullet hole between the eyes. Meanwhile, DCI Pirie is called in to unravel a case where nothing is quite as it seems. And as she gets closer to the truth, it becomes clear that not everyone shares her desire for justice. Or even the idea of what justice is.

Liam McIlvanney – The Quaker

Glasgow, 1969. In the grip of the worst winter for years, the city is brought to its knees by a killer whose name fills the streets with fear: The Quaker. He’s taken his next victim — the third woman from the same nightclub — and dumped her in the street like rubbish. The police are left chasing a ghost, with no new leads and no hope of catching their prey. After six months, DI Duncan McCormack, a talented young detective from the Highlands, is ordered to join the investigation — with a view to shutting it down for good.

Khurrum Rahman – East of Hounslow

Javid – call him Jay – is a dope dealer living in West London. He goes to mosque on Friday, and he’s just bought his pride and joy – a BMW. He lives with his mum, and life seems sweet. But his world is about to turn upside-down. Because MI5 have been watching him, and they think he’s just the man they need for a delicate mission. One thing’s for sure: now he’s a long way East of Hounslow, Jay’s life will never be the same again.

The Dead Good Reader Awards 2019 – winners

On Friday 19 July 2019, crime and thriller lovers came together at the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate to celebrate their favourite books and authors at the fifth annual Dead Good Reader Awards.

Here are the six authors you voted best in class!

The Nosy Parker Award for Best Amateur Detective:

The Suspect by Fiona Barton

The Jury’s Out Award for Most Gripping Courtroom Drama:

Thirteen by Steve Cavanagh

The Dish Served Cold Award for Best Revenge Thriller:

My Lovely Wife by Samantha Downing

The Cancel All Plans Award for the Book You Can’t Put Down:

Skin Deep by Liz Nugent

The Cat and Mouse Award for Most Elusive Villain:

Last of the Magpies by Mark Edwards

The Dead Good Recommends Award for Most Recommended Book:

The Stone Circle by Elly Griffiths

Congratulations to all the winning authorsand those shortlisted for the Dead Good Reader Awards 2019!