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

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

News flash: Peter Lovesey is an MWA Grand Master

Peter Lovesey (Photograph for Detectives
Beyond Borders by Peter Rozovsky)

Mystery Writers of America have announced that Peter Lovesey has been named an MWA Grand Master. The Last Detective, first of Lovesey's novels about Detective Superintendent Peter Diamond, is one of the best alienated-cop novels. I got to meet and chat with Lovesey at Crimefest 2017 in Bristol, and I am pleased to report that he is one of the most pleasant fellows one could want to meet, entertaining as a panelist and informative as an interview subject. And here's an old post about that most virtuosic of crime-fiction feats, Lovesey's Bertie and the Seven Bodies.

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I like authors who solve narrative problems, and that superb craftsman and fine storyteller Peter Lovesey solved a whopper in his 1990 mystery Bertie and the Seven Bodies (Felony and Mayhem Press), the second of his three novels about Bertie, Prince of Wales.

I picked up this affectionate tribute to Golden Age mysteries, Agatha Christie's in particular, as a change of pace, and I noticed early on how skillfully Lovesey captures the flavor and tone of an English country-house mystery while at the same time remaining thoroughly up to date.

How does he do this? First by making the jovial prince and the pretty hostess more explicitly randy than his predecessors in the Golden Age probably would have; second, by describing the pheasant hunt that is the occasion for the story's house party far more thoroughly than I expect a Golden Age author would have done:

"The planning for this week of sport had begun more than a year ago, and the arrangements couldn't be altered at the drop of a hat. What with loaders, beaters, stops, pickers-up, drivers and catering staff, we could be using more than two hundred personnel."

"The dead birds were tidily lined up for counting, almost two hundred pheasants, one of the gamekeepers said, bringing our day's bag past seven hundred."

"I waited, flanked by my loaders, picturing the activity in the coverts as the fugitive birds scampered ahead of the beaters. A pheasant has a natural reluctance to take to its wings, and it requires a well-managed beat to put it up precisely over the guns without flushing too many other at once."

"This battue was faultless. They presented the birds in a long, soaring sequence almost vertically above us. I worked with three guns, receiving from the loader on my right, firing and passing it empty to the other man, never shifting my eyes from the sky."

The accumulated weight of these vignettes adds up to a startling picture of sybaritism, a portrait of long, hard work by many devoted to the idle and momentary enjoyment of a few. And yet they work as action and description without ever coming off as shrill, polemical, condescending or anachronistically knowing.

Why? Because Bertie describes the scene with an innocent eye. He does not know that what he sees might be appalling to the democratic and ecological sensibilities of today's readers. That distance safely allows us both to enjoy the scene and to be surprised, even shocked, by its waste and luxury. To put it another way, Lovesey has written the most socially authentic-seeming hunt scene I can remember in any crime story.

Lovesey appeals beautifully to current readers' sensibilities. At the same time, he maintains the atmosphere of a story composed in the past (that he does this all against yet a third layer of time, the story's 19th-century setting, is a matter for discussion elsewhere). What other authors do this?
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(Read another Detectives Beyond Borders post about Bertie and the Seven Bodies.)

© Peter Rozovsky 2008, 2017

Classical (and biblical) gas: Walter Mosley's characters

Walter Mosley in a photo
I wish I'd taken.

I've been reading some Walter Mosley in preparation for next week's Edgar Awards dinner, where Mosley will be named a grand master by Mystery Writers of America and I'll be snapping pictures and schmoozing. Once again I ask myself: Does any crime writer take the Western intellectual tradition as seriously as Mosley does?

He has created protagonists with names taken from biblical wisdom literature (Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins) and from the ur-figure of Greek philosophy (Socrates Fortlow), as a bonus giving the latter a surname related to a Latin root meaning "strong." I thus take it as doubly clever that when Mosley creates a hero short on book learning, he drops the classical and biblical allusions in the name and cuts straight to a quality like those that such names embody: Fearless Jones.

But the Fearless Jones books also include characters named Ulysses (known to all but his mother as "Useless") and Hector. And Fearless' brainy co-hero, who operates a used bookstore when he's not getting into deadly trouble, is Paris Minton.  I suspect, given Minton's susceptibility to female beauty, that he just may be named for Paris, who eloped with Helen and started the Trojan War.

I take it is significant that all those character names go back before the New Testament to Greece, Rome, and the Hebrew Bible. Mosley, I think, is interested in the very roots of things. I find circumstantial support for this view in the novel Fear of the Dark when Minton notices a shelf of Greek philosophers and says: "I like some'a these guys ... But I prefer the older generation: Herodotus, Homer, and Sophocles."

© Peter Rozovsky 2016

Manhattan Mayhem in The Philadelphia Inquirer

My review of Manhattan Mayhem, a star-studded collection of short crime fiction that celebrates Manhattan on the occasion of the Mystery Writers of America's 70th birthday, appears in Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer.

The 17 contributors include Lee Child, Jeffery Deaver, Mary Higgins Clark, T. Jefferson Parker, and others, and each story takes place in or on a different Manhattan neighborhood, building, or river.

Highlights include Julie Hyzy's proving she can write chilling suspense as well as the cozy novels for which she is known, and a prime contender for greatest title ever: S.J. Rozan's  "Chin Yong-Yun Makes a Shiddach."

Read the entire review at philly.com.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Wow! I didn't know she could do that!

The second story in Manhattan Mayhem is a piece of dark psychological suspense with an ending I did not see coming.  It's one of my two favorite stories in the collection so far, and what makes it notable is that the writer is Julie Hyzy, author of two successful cozy mystery series. (She had the good taste to turn one of my suggestions into the title of one of her books.)

Nothing in Hyzy's previous work and nothing I knew about her prepared me for her Manhattan Mayhem story, "White Rabbit," so today's question is What writers have surprised you in this way? What novels or stories have made you think, "Wow! I didn't know he (or she) could do that!"?

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Manhattan Mayhem includes 17 short stories, and it ccelebrates the 70th anniversary of theMystery Writers of America, the organization that, among other things, presents the annual Edgar Awards. My other favorite in the collection so far is T. Jefferson Parker's "Me and Mikey," and the best title has to be S.J. Rozan's "Chin Yong-Yun Makes a Shiddach." The contributors include Jeffery Deaver. Lee Child, Margaret Maron, Thomas J. Cook, and more,  a strong cast.

© 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

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.)

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

© Peter Rozovsky 2013

Edgar is Irish, or DBB friend lands a nice nomination

Books to Die For: The World's Greatest Mystery Writers on the World's Greatest Mystery Novels, edited by John Connolly and Detectives Beyond Borders friend Declan Burke, has been nominated for a 2013 Edgar Award in the best critical/biographical category.

The Edgars will be presented May 2 in New York. Congratulations to Burke and Connolly for a bit of payoff on their stupendous effort, and good luck.

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Alan Glynn's Bloodland is up for best paperback original novel, Glynn joining Burke and Connolly as Irish nominees for this year's Edgars. Bloodland has its finger on the pulse of contemporary paranoia and manipulation like no other crime novel I can remember, not least in its invocation of 21st-century Orwellianisms such as "narrative," "brand," and "to the next level."

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Here's Glynn on  the Golden Age of paranoia.   Here are my previous posts about Bloodland. And here's a list of nominees in all categories, from the Edgars Web site.

© 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?

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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.

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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

The Edgars, Part I

Anne Holt was both gracious and jovial when I told her after last night's Edgar Awards dinner how much I was enjoying her novel 1222, but she kept addressing me as "sir."

She's about my age, so there was no call for such formality. "Typical Scandinavian reticence and reserve," I thought, until I noticed sometime afterward that I'd lost my name tag. So all Holt, whose book had been short-listed for the best-novel Edgar, had to go on was an empty plastic card-holder with a yellow strip dangling from it that read "Press." Anyone who detects irony in the juxtaposition can take it somewhere else, pal. I have a job to do.

I finished reading Holt's book on the train home from New York, and I remain impressed by her boldness in taking an old Agatha Christie formula and infusing it with tension and a thoroughly contemporary feel. The novel's dénouement may have just a touch of the anti-Americanism that makes some readers of Scandinavian crime fiction roll their eyes, but if it does, Holt's handing of the matter is nuanced and humane.

(Mo Hayder's Gone won the best-novel Edgar. Here's a list of winners. And here are the nominees.)

© 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

Edgars beyond borders: Awards night

The 2010 Edgar ceremony begins in about twenty minutes. Here's a post I made in January about two beyond-borders nominees for the top U.S. crime fiction prizes. And here's a link to all nominees at the Mystery Writers of America Web site. Good luck and congratulations to all.

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Nominees for the 2010 Edgar Awards include two beyond-borders books previously discussed here: Jo Nesbø's Nemesis, translated by Don Bartlett, for best novel, and L.C. Tyler's The Herring-Seller's Apprentice, for best paperback original.

Here's part of what I wrote about Nemesis last year:

"Nemesis may be Jo Nesbø's best novel, more tightly constructed, sticking more closely to its central story than his others, with only hints of the flashbacks that are such an integral part of The Redbreast. It muses philosophically but unobtrusively on revenge both personal and national and, as usual with Nesbø, it contains wonderful deadpan humor."

Tyler surprised me at Crime Fest 2009 when he said he admired Allan Guthrie – unexpected for a self-described author of comic cozy mysteries. The Herring-Seller's Apprentice sparked much lively discussion on this blog, including a quiz for which Tyler graciously offered a copy of his follow-up novel, Ten Little Herrings, as a prize. (Revisit that discussion here.)

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Winners here.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010