Shot at the Edgars

Peter Lovesey, named an MWA Grand Master at the 2018 Edgar Awards. Photo by
Peter Rozovsky for Detectives Beyond Borders.

© Peter Rozovsky 2018

A Few Minutes of the Condor: James Grady at the Edgar Awards

James Grady. Photography by Peter
Rozovsky for Detectives Beyond Borders

Authors talk about how tongue-tied they get in the presence of their literary heroes.  Not me. I've made Susan Sontag and Fran Lebowitz laugh. I know from firsthand experience what one Nobel laureate thought of instant coffee.  And I've schmoozed giants of crime and thriller writing in limousines, outside banquet halls, by coat racks, and queued up for free booze.

Three years ago I wrote this after the 2015 Edgar Awards dinner of the Mystery Writers of America:

"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.'

That meeting was funny, slightly awkward, and for me revelatory--or it would have been if I'd not already suspected that James Ellroy's outsize bluster masked a touching and eager vulnerability. I like to think that this colored my subsequent reading and rereading of his work, particularly Blood's a Rover, but also The Big Nowhere and The Black Dahlia.

I gained no such insight when I buttonholed James Grady at the 2018 Edgars a week and a half ago.   But I had just bought Grady's Six Days of the Condor, having no idea I would meet the author two days later, and I had to share the news. "Do you mind talking about a book you wrote so long ago?" I asked Grady. (Condor appeared in 1974, the film version starring Robert Redford the next year.)

"Not at all," he replied, smiling broadly, and we talked for a minute or two about that other Washington suspense novelist E. Howard Hunt, whom Grady said he had not known, and Hunt's fellow Watergate burglar Frank Sturgis, whom he had. (Grady writes about his discussions with Sturgis in an informative introduction to the Mysterious Press edition of Six Days of the Condor.)

So what's the lesson? If you're a reader or a writer, the writers you like are probably pretty interesting people who know pretty interesting stuff, and why would anyone be shy about chatting with someone like that?

© Peter Rozovsky 2018

MWAaaaaaaaa! for mystery

Jeff Markowitz, head of the MWA's New York
chapter, who really is as genial as he appears here.
Photo by Peter Rozovsky

I'm not a joiner, but I'm going to make an exception for the Mystery Writers of America, the New York chapter of whose Mix and Mingle brunch I attended Saturday. A good time was had by everyone whose opinion I could verify, and the only glitch was that, thanks to some confusion on the staff's part, I got an extra margarita. 

Here's some of what I learned:

1) Sara Blaedel, Danish crime writer, now lives in New York, knows a lot of stuff, and is good to chat with over brunch.

2) Ben Keller, whom I had not known previously, is a PI and from Louisiana, and what could be cooler background for an author than that? Except that's not even the coolest thing about his career.

It was good to see Charles Salzberg, author, teacher, writing guru, and a generous soul who has channelled some editing work my way; author Chris Knopf, previously unknown to me and apparently a good egg (but what else would you expect from someone who hangs out with Charles Salzberg?); Tim O'Mara; Dru Ann Love, one of those super volunteer-fan-reviewers who are a big part of the glue that holds the crime fiction community together; and other folks whose names I never got but who left me feeling like a hayseed clutching a worn carpet bag and gaping in awe at all the crime-related events going on in this city. And the food was good!

 © Peter Rozovsky 2018

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

A schmuck in New York

Last night I bought a crime novel called Schmuck.  It's a cozy.

But seriously, folks.  I was a great audience.

The Schmuck writer is Ross Klavan, and he read at New York's Beach Cafe, as did Charles Salzberg, Richie Narvaez, my old Bouchercon panel mate Terrence McCauley, Tim O'Mara, and Suzanne Solomon.

Not only was the pizza free, but the writing was good, and the readings began at 10 p.m., a more sensible hour for crime fiction than all those genteel 7 and 7:30 p.m. starts. I liked the evening's format, too: two authors reading, then a short break before the next two. This allowed socializing, blogging, and unobtrusive bathroom breaks, and organizers of future events would do well to follow the format.

*

Narvaez is president of the New York chapter of the Mystery Writers of America, which is bringing a daylong crime-writing workshop called MWA University to Philadelphia June 28. Manhattanites are an insular lot, and they get nervous when they have to leave their skinny island. Come on out to the workshop (whose cost is surprisingly low), and make them feel at home.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

Mystery training with the MWA in Philly

Not much has happened in Philadelphia since Thomas Jefferson left town, but that will change on Saturday, June 28, when the Mystery Writers of America come to town with MWA University—Philadelphia, a full-day writing workshop with the experts for just about anybody.

Teacher/leaders include Hallie Ephron, Reed Farrel Coleman, Edgar winner Daniel Stashower, and more, and topics include everything from turning an idea into a story to the business of writing. The cost is low, just $50 for MWA members, $75 for non-members, with $25 deducted from the membership fee for those who join within 30 days of the event, and the price includes lunch.

This one looks so good that I might even sign up myself.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014  

Thursday Night at the Edgars

By the time you read this, I should be on my way to New York for Thursday's Edgar Awards.

Nominees for best novel are:

Sandrine's Case by Thomas H. Cook (Grove Atlantic – The Mysterious Press)
The Humans by Matt Haig (Simon & Schuster)
Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger (Simon & Schuster – Atria Books)
How the Light Gets In by Louise Penny (Minotaur Books)
Standing in Another Man's Grave by Ian Rankin (Hachette Book Group – Reagan Arthur Books)
Until She Comes Home by Lori Roy (Penguin Group USA – Dutton Books)

For best first novel, it's:

The Resurrectionist by Matthew Guinn (W.W. Norton)
Ghostman by Roger Hobbs (Alfred A. Knopf)
Rage Against the Dying by Becky Masterman (Minotaur Books)
Red Sparrow by Jason Matthews (Simon & Schuster - Scribner)
Reconstructing Amelia by Kimberly McCreight (HarperCollins Publishers)

And for best paperback original:

The Guilty One by Lisa Ballantyne (HarperCollins Publishers – William Morrow Paperbacks)
Almost Criminal by E. R. Brown (Dundurn)
Joe Victim by Paul Cleave (Simon & Schuster – Atria Books)
Joyland by Stephen King (Hard Case Crime)
The Wicked Girls by Alex Marwood (Penguin Group USA - Penguin Books)
Brilliance by Marcus Sakey (Amazon Publishing – Thomas and Mercer)

Nominees from beyond U.S. borders include Haig, Penny, Rankin, Cleave, Brown, Marwood, Ballantyne, and John Connolly (for best short story).

Robert Crais and Carolyn Hart will be named Grand Masters by the Mystery Writers of America, and Aunt Agatha's Bookstore, in Ann Arbor, Mich., gets the Raven award.. Read the complete list of nominees here, and I'll be back later, God and this crap computer willing.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014 

Table 35: More from the Edgar Awards

More news from Thursday's Edgar Awards dinner, meat, potatoes, and prizes courtesy of the Mystery Writers of America:

1. I sat at the Soho table again this year, which meant I renewed acquaintances with the affable Ed Lin, whom I'd met previously at Bouchercon 2012 in Cleveland. Back then I'd been interested to learn that he has a novel set in Taiwan upcoming from Soho. This time, talk turned to his three novels set in New York's Chinatown around 1975. Lin said he chose that period because of turbulent events of the time on the Chinese mainland and in Taiwan, with old leaders dead or dying, and the Cultural Revolution drawing to an end.  What does that have to do with a troubled Chinese-American Vietnam vet cop in New York? I don't know, but I'm eager to find out. The novels are This is a Bust, Snakes Can't Run, and One Red Bastard.
2. Dennis Lehane, whose Live By Night won the best-novel Edgar, drew appreciative nods and murmurs for expressing his gratitude to bookstores. He also thanked libraries for putting books into the hands of "a kid from the wrong side of the tracks" free of charge.
3. Ken Follett, named a grand master along with Margaret Maron, displayed an enthusiasm for his work that made me think it must be great fun to write massively successful international thrillers. I haven't read Follett, but I may do so now. And that's what I like best about conventions and other crime-fiction events: Meeting, talking with, or just hearing new (or new to me) authors and, because of those meetings, getting excited about reading their work.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Edgar Night 2013

No joy for Alan Glynn, Declan Burke, and John Connolly at the 2013 Edgar Awards Thursday, as Glynn's Bloodland lost out to The Last Policeman by Ben H. Winters for best paperback original, and the Burke- and Connolly-edited Books to Die For was bested in the best critical/biographical category by James O'Brien's The Scientific Sherlock Holmes.

On the other hand, I did discover a crime writer born in Northern Ireland whom I had not heard of before: Niall Leonard, whose Crusher was nominated in the best-young-adult novel category. And Paul French, mentioned recently in this space with a link to his discussion with Adrian McKinty and Parker Bilal at the Adelaide Writers' Festival, won the best-fact-crime Edgar for Midnight in Peking. French offered the tantalizing remark in his acceptance speech that more and more Western crime fiction is being translated in to Chinese with, as well, "more Chinese crime (fiction) for you."

Here's a partial list of nominees, with winners highlighted in red, and I'll be back with more tomorrow. Visit the Mystery Writers of America website for more.

BEST NOVEL
The Lost Ones by Ace Atkins (Penguin Group USA – G.P. Putnam’s Sons)
The Gods of Gotham by Lyndsay Faye (Penguin Group USA – Amy Einhorn Books/G.P. Putnam’s Sons)
Gone Girl: A Novel by Gillian Flynn (Crown Publishers)
Potboiler by Jesse Kellerman (Penguin Group USA – G.P. Putnam’s Sons)
Sunset by Al Lamanda (Gale Cengage Learning – Five Star)
Live by Night by Dennis Lehane (HarperCollins Publishers – William Morrow)
All I Did Was Shoot My Man by Walter Mosley (Penguin Group USA – Riverhead Books)

BEST FIRST NOVEL BY AN AMERICAN AUTHOR
The Map of Lost Memories by Kim Fay (Random House Publishing– Ballantine) Don’t Ever Get Old by Daniel Friedman (Minotaur Books - Thomas Dunne Books) Mr. Churchill’s Secretary by Susan Elia MacNeal (Random House Publishing– Bantam Books)
The Expats by Chris Pavone (Crown Publishers)
The 500 by Matthew Quirk (Hachette Book Group – Little, Brown and Company – Reagan Arthur)
Black Fridays by Michael Sears (Penguin Group USA – G.P. Putnam’s Sons)

BEST PAPERBACK ORIGINAL
Complication by Isaac Adamson (Soft Skull Press)
Whiplash River by Lou Berney (HarperCollins Publishers – William Morrow Paperbacks)
Bloodland by Alan Glynn (Picador)
Blessed are the Dead by Malla Nunn (Simon & Schuster – Atria Books - Emily Bestler Books)
The Last Policeman: A Novel by Ben H. Winters (Quirk Books)

BEST FACT CRIME
Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China by Paul French (Penguin Group USA – Penguin Books)
Devil in the Grove: Thurgood Marshall, the Groveland Boys, and the Dawn of a New America by Gilbert King (HarperCollins Publishers – Harper)
More Forensics and Fiction: Crime Writers’ Morbidly Curious Questions Expertly Answered by D.P. Lyle, MD (Medallion Press)
Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies by Ben Macintyre (Crown Publishers)
The People Who Eat Darkness: The True Story of a Young Woman Who Vanished from the Streets of Tokyo – and the Evil that Swallowed Her Up by Richard Lloyd Parry (Farrar Straus & Giroux Originals)

BEST CRITICAL/BIOGRAPHICAL
Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe: The Hard-Boiled Detective Transformed by John Paul Athanasourelis (McFarland and Company)
Books to Die For: The World's Greatest Mystery Writers on the World's Greatest Mystery Novels edited by John Connolly and Declan Burke (Simon & Schuster – Atria Books – Emily Bestler Books)
The Scientific Sherlock Holmes: Cracking the Case with Science and Forensics by James O’Brien (Oxford University Press)
In Pursuit of Spenser: Mystery Writers on Robert B. Parker and the Creation of an American Hero edited by Otto Penzler (Smart Pop)

BEST SHORT STORY
"Iphigenia in Aulis" – An Apple for the Creature by Mike Carey (Penguin Group USA – Ace Books)
"Hot Sugar Blues" – Mystery Writers of America Presents: Vengeance by Steve Liskow (Hachette Book Group – Little, Brown and Company – Mulholland Books) "The Void it Often Brings With It” – Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine by Tom Piccirilli (Dell Magazines)
"The Unremarkable Heart" – Mystery Writers of America Presents: Vengeance by Karin Slaughter (Hachette Book Group – Little, Brown and Company – Mulholland Books)
"Still Life No. 41" – Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine by Teresa Solana (Dell Magazines)

GRAND MASTER
Ken Follett
Margaret Maron

RAVEN AWARDS
Oline Cogdill
Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore, San Diego and Redondo Beach, CA

ELLERY QUEEN AWARD
Akashic Books

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Getting ready for the Edgars

The Detectives Beyond Borders wardrobe department is busy kitting me out for Thursday's Edgar Awards dinner at the Grand Hyatt in New York, hosted and presented by the Mystery Writers of America.

Overseas nominees (several from Ireland, naturally) are up for awards in several categories: Alan Glynn, for best paperback original (the excellent Bloodland); Declan Burke and John Connolly for best critical/biographical book (Books to Die For); and Jane Casey's The Reckoning, for the Mary Higgins Clark award. Teresa Solana (Spain) is up for best short story with "Still Life No. 41."  Malla Nunn's Blessed are the Dead (South Africa) is on the shortlist for best paperback original.

Midnight in Peking: How the Murder of a Young Englishwoman Haunted the Last Days of Old China by Paul French is up for best fact crime book. (See French in conversation with Parker Bilal and Adrian McKinty at the Adelaide Writers' Festival.)

Read my reports on the 2012 Edgars. See a complete list of the 2013 Edgar nominees.

(This just in: The wardrobe committee has made its decision. We're going with the charcoal gray suit, the white shirt, and a silk tie with a splash of purple.)

*

Meanwhile, Open Road is celebrating the Edgars with contests, news, and low-priced e-book versions of selected past winners.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

東野 圭吾's tribute to 江戸川 乱歩 and 松本 清張

It may be coincidence, but a district and a park on the first page of Keigo Higashino's The Devotion of Suspect X bear the names of two pioneering Japanese crime writers.

The page takes a character on a walk to Seicho Garden Park that passes a road leading to Edogawa. Edogawa is one of Tokyo's twenty-three special wards. More to the point, Seicho Matsumoto (1909-1992) and Edogawa Rampo (1894-1965) were two of the most popular and influential crime writers in twentieth-century Japan. Edogawa Rampo (it's a pen name, and yes, it really is a Japanese rendering of Edgar Allan Poe) promoted Japanese crime fiction tirelessly and founded the group that later became Mystery Writers of Japan.  He admired Arthur Conan Doyle in addition to Poe, and his fiction, criticism, and organizing "played a major role in the development of Japanese mystery fiction," according to Wikipedia.

Seicho Matsumoto was a kind of Jean-Patrick Manchette, a writer of spare, bleak, socially acute narratives credited with breaking new ground in narrative technique:

"Dispensing with formulaic plot devices such as puzzles," Wikipedia says, "Seichō incorporated elements of human psychology and ordinary life. In particular, his works often reflect a wider social context and postwar nihilism that expanded the scope and further darkened the atmosphere of the genre. His exposé of corruption among police officials as well as criminals was a new addition to the field."

Seichō Matsumoto memorial museum,
Fukuoka Prefecture, Japan

The solitary walker of Higashino's opening chapter is a mathematics teacher who engages in amateur sleuthing that will remind readers of Edogawa Rampo's man Sherlock Holmes. And his profession just might mark another point of affinity with Matsumoto, who wrote a novel called in English Points and Lines. (How much more mathematical can one get?) Higashino's emphasis on geography may also bring Matsumoto to mind.

If all this is mere coincidence, the coincidence is suggestive. Let's assume it's deliberate and once again ask this diverting question: How have crime writers paid tribute in their stories to predecessors and colleagues?

***

The Devotion of Suspect X was shortlisted for best novel at this week's Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America, one of four books by a non-American author on the five-book shortlist and one of two translated novels. The winner was Gone by Mo Hayder.

(Here's an old post about Seicho Matsumoto, my reading of whom predates this blog. Rereading the post reminds me of what a bracing writer Matsumoto was.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

I heard voices ...

... in the elevator up to the Grand Hyatt ballroom for the Edgar Awards dinner Thursday evening — rich, sonorous voices resonant with seriousness and importance, and no way to change the channel.

Yes, the Grand Hyatt in New York has installed televisions in its elevators for those guests, room-service waiters, bellhops and maids who can't stand to be without television for the amount of time it takes to get from the lobby to the room. You can draw your own conclusions about what this says about our culture; I'll just say that I hope I never get stuck in an elevator at the Grand Hyatt. And if I ever stay at the hotel, I'm requesting a room on a lower floor to minimize the duration of my forced exposure to smarmy televised punditry. Or else I'll take the stairs.

***

Once I escaped into the ballroom, my only beef was Wellington, and it was on my plate at dinner, and it was just fine. The wine flowed freely, the speeches were short, and the only one that wasn't — Martha Grimes', on her recognition as a grandmaster by the Mystery Writers of America, who bestow the Edgars — was funny and, in its tribute to Stuart M. Kaminsky, touching. I took special note of Joe Meyers' remarks upon accepting the Ellery Queen Award. Meyers writes for the Connecticut Post newspaper, and he thanked his editors for bucking the anti-books trend in American newspapers and increasing the space the Post allots to books coverage. I just wept quietly in my Pinot noir.

Neil Gaiman, up for a best-short-story Edgar, has the air of the cool, shaggy math teacher you liked in high school and, thanks to the drunken Poe enthusiast at the next bar stool this evening who recognized the face that illustrates this post, I'm reminded that the Edgars also included a message from John Cusack and a trailer from Cusack's new Poe action/mystery movie The Raven, which looks worth a look.

I was pleased to renew acquaintances over dinner with editors, authors and assorted honchos from Soho Press, which played such a big role in my introduction to international crime fiction. And when Sarah Weinman, ex of Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, currently of Publishers Marketplace, and seated across the table from me, sent out her as-they-happen Edgars Tweets, I felt like I was at the center of the crime-fiction universe.

 © Peter Rozovsky 2012

Edgars abroad

This week is Edgar week in New York, with the Mystery Writers of America to announce the winners of their annual awards Thursday at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York.

I'll be there and, while the phenomenon of Detectives Beyond Borders dressed for dinner is worth noting, the real story is the international flavor of the short lists, including four of the five best-novel contenders. The non-American nominees include:

Gone by Mo Hayder (Britain), The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino (Japan), 1222 by Anne Holt (Norway), and Field Gray by Philip Kerr (Britain), for best novel and Death of the Mantis by Michael Stanley (South Africa) and Vienna Twilight by Frank Tallis (Britain) for best paperback original.

Congratulations to all the nominees, and I'll see you at dinner. (Browse the complete list of nominees at the MWA Web site.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2012