Photos from the 2015 Edgar Awards banquet

James Ellroy

The Edgar Awards, given by the Mystery Writers of America, are coming up April 28, 2016, and this year two friends and associates of Detectives Beyond Borders' are up for awards: Adrian McKinty, up for Best Paperback Original Novel for Gun Street Girl, and Duane Swierczynski, nominated in the best novel category for Canary.

Ian Rankin, Stephen King,
Karin Slaughter, Stuart Neville

I'll be there taking pictures, schmoozing, and maybe asking a question or two of 2016 MWA Grand Master Walter Mosely.  In the meantime, some photos I took at the 2015 Edgars.

Stephen King, Hilary Davidson

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

Sara Paretsky

Stephen King, Karin Slaughter

James Ellroy

Sara Paretsky

Edgar Awards 2015 — James Ellroy on God and dogs

James Ellroy, photos by your
humble blogkeeper.

I got my New York errands done early on Wednesday, slipped into a phone booth to change into my suit, and got to the ballrooms at the Grand Hyatt a few minutes before anything had started at Wednesday night's Edgar Awards.

At the end of the long anteroom outside the banquet hall, a bald man slouched on a bench, looking not nearly as tall as he does when gesticulating behind a podium.

"Mr. Ellroy," I said. "Congratulations."

"I've met you before," he said, extending his hand.

"You have. Otto's store, when you read from Perfidia."

"Did you enjoy it?" he said, straightening slightly.

"I did. I read it in a week, a solid hundred pages a night."

"That's the way to do it," Ellroy said with an approving nod. "Steady reading, a couch, a dog."

"Except for the couch and the dog, just how I did it."

"Well, they want me in there. We'll talk later."

"I'll be running up, getting in people's way, shooting pictures."

"Shoot away." Another approving nod.

Ellroy talked about dogs again when he accepted the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master award. "My life," he told the crowd, "has been one long journey to commune with the talking dog."

This was — in part, at least —  a tribute to his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, whose logo is a borzoi, or Russian wolfhound. Ellroy also said that he sees God in everything, offered the frank literary quotation that "a literature that cannot be vulgarized is no literature at all," and said: "My first words were, `Where's the book?'" and then, with a laugh I took as gently self-mocking, "and `Where's the booze?'"

Oh, and Stephen King swore more than Ellroy did.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Edgar Awards 2015 — The speeches, or Charles Ardai on editors, plus DBB and YA

Charles Ardai

I've long admired Charles Ardai for founding and running Hard Case Crime. I've long respected him for what Hard Case authors say about his devotion to their work. And I am grateful for his  generosity when I had some questions about publishing and editing a few years ago.

But I like him even better after this week's Edgar Awards dinner. Ardai was on hand to receive the Ellery Queen Award, and his acceptance speech constituted the best vindication of editing and editors I have ever heard.

Would anyone scold a great conductor for not letting the first bassoon play more? he asked. Would anyone denigrate a great movie director for exercising casting control over his or her own movies? No. Yet people these days disguise their ignorant contempt for editors and editing behind references to "gatekeepers," perpetrating the delusion that editors only interfere with a writer's "voice."  Ardai became the second person I know to describe gatekeeper as a "sneering" term. Since I was the first, while I maintained my composure and kept snapping pictures during Ardai's speech, inwardly I was cheering myself hoarse.

Ardai said he gained his respect for editors early, when an editor performed surgery on one of his stories, changing almost every sentence. That taught him that editors make stories better, and that's what made him decide to be an editor when he grew up. On the way, though, he founded an Internet company and became an award-winning author. Yet an editor is what he wanted to be and what he talked about.

If I were an author, I'd want a man like Ardai behind my work. Join me in saluting a righteous dude, Charles Ardai.

  ***

Hilary Davidson

Lois Duncan

I was a youth and then an unmodified adult; young adult fiction had not been invented when I was a YA myself.  That's why I had never heard of Lois Duncan before Edgar night.

Duncan was named a Mystery Writers of America grand master, and I learned from Hilary Davidson's introduction that Duncan is rated alongside S.E. Hinton and Judy Blume on the young-adult Mount Rushmore. I learned that her books had been censored, and that she wrote an account of the quest for her daughter's killer.  I learned from Davidson and later from Sarah Weinman how much Duncan's work had meant to them.  And that's one of the things I like best about conventions, dinners, and other mass crime fiction gatherings: The chance to learn about fascinating people and genres I might not otherwise have considered.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

I shot Stephen King: Photos from the Edgar Awards dinner 2015

Stephen King (All photos by
your humble blogkeeper.
List of winners and
nominees at the Mystery
Writers of America Web site.)

Charles Ardai

Sara Paretsky, Hilary Davidson

James Ellroy

Jon and Ruth Jordan

Ian Rankin, Stephen King, Karin
Slaughter, and Stuart Neville

Sara Paretsky and her shadow

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

It's almost time for the Edgars

It's almost time for the Edgar Awards, presented by the Mystery Writers of America and recognizing the best in crime fiction published in the U.S., and the 2015 awards dinner ought to be especially entertaining: James Ellroy is one of this year's two MWA Grand Masters.

I'll also be pleased to see Charles Ardai receive his Ellery Queen Award. Ardai is an entrepreneur, a publisher, an editor, and an award-winning author who changed the look of American crime fiction when he founded Hard Case Crime with Max Phillips. He's thoughtful, he's intelligent, and he's a nice guy to boot.

I'll get to see Jon and Ruth Jordan accept the Raven Award for outstanding contributions to crime fiction in an area other than creative writing, and, as I wrote when they won an Anthony Award at Bouchercon in 2009, "I feel quite sure that no one has deserved an award more."

Jon and Ruth publish Crimespree Magazine, and they organize Bouchercons. They are friends to authors everywhere, inspirations to all who know them, and they live in the world's coolest house: over the family machine shop, housing more books than the Library of Congress, with fresh sausage on the stove 24 hours a day, a bathtub filled with beer, and nooks and crannies even they probably have never seen.

The awards dinner happens Wednesday, April 29, at the Grand Hyatt in New York, and it's just part of a slew of events this week and next; here's a page with links to everything that's happening. Here's a bit about the Jordans, Ellroy, and their fellow special-award winners.  And here's a complete list of nominees, including Stuart Neville, whose Final Silence is up for the best-novel Edgar.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015