Louise Penny and Trudy Nan Boyce are the recipients of the 2017 Pinckley Prizes for Crime Fiction, named to honor the memory of Diana Pinckley. Bestselling author Louise Penny, the first Canadian to receive the award, is the winner of the Pinckley Prize for Distinguished Body of Work. Trudy Nan Boyce was given the Pinckley Prize for Debut Novel for her book Out of the Blues.
The Private Eye Writers of America announced the finalists for this year's Shamus Awards. Best Private Eye Novel contendees include Reed Farrel Coleman, Where It Hurts; Lindsey Davis, The Graveyard of the Hesperides; Timothy Hallinan, Fields Where They Lay; Al Lamanda, With 6 You Get Wally; and Robert S. Levinson, The Stardom Affair. For all the nominees head on over to the PWA website.
The Audio Publishers Association named this year's winners of the annual Audie Awards for excellence in audiobook narration and presentation. Best Mystery went to The Crossing, by Michael Connelly, narrated by Titus Welliver, and best Thriller/Suspense was won by Cross Justice, by James Patterson, narrated by Ruben Santiago Hudson and Jefferson Mays. For all the various category finalists and winners, head on over to the APA's official page.
Craig Sisterson of the Ngaio Marsh awards for crime fiction announced a brand new literary award for Kiwi true-crime books. The Ngaio Marsh Awards have honored New Zealand’s crime fiction since 2010, but the long-term plan was always to expand the award categories to highlight excellence in other forms of local crime writing. And as Sisterson noted, with more than a dozen local true crime novels published in the last two years, now seems like the right time to start celebrating non-fiction crime writing with its own award.
Sponsored by the Writers’ Police Academy, the Golden Donut Short Story Contest is now accepting submissions. The contest requires authors to write a story that’s exactly 200 words, based on the photo posted on the website, with this year’s final judge Craig Johnson (author of the best-selling Walt Longmire mysteries and 2017 WPA Guest of Honor) deciding the winner. The Golden Donut winner earns a free 2018 registration to a Writers’ Police Academy.
This year, the crime festival Bloody Scotland' is producing its first ever book of fiction, an anthology of short stories published in partnership with Historic Environment Scotland. The anthology has Scotland’s crime writers using the "sinister side" of the country’s heritage in a series of "gripping, chilling and redemptive" stories. Contributors include Val McDermid, Christopher Brookmyre, Denise Mina, Ann Cleeves, Louise Welsh, Lin Anderson, Gordon Brown, Doug Johnstone, Craig Robertson, E S Thomson, Sara Sheridan and Stuart MacBride, with tales ranging from a murder in an ancient broch to a dark sychological thriller set in Edinburgh Castle to an ‘urbex’ rivalry turning fatal in the concrete galleries of an abandoned modernist ruin.
Down & Out Books is celebrating the sixth anniversary of the independent company that was founded to publish quality literary and crime fiction. Fifty-six titles are planned for release in 2017 and forty titles are already under contract for 2018 publication. Authors publishing with Down & Out Books have won a number of leading awards, including the Anthony Award, Shamus Award, the Macavity, and the IPPY Award. The trend continues this year with the news in May that six of its books have been nominated for a 2017 Anthony Award.
Meanwhile, Seventh Street Books, the mystery, thriller, and crime fiction imprint of Prometheus Books, is marking its fifth anniversary at Book Expo America. Jon Kurtz, In the short time since the publisher started, their books have been up for Edgar, Barry, Anthony, and Macavity Awards. This year, of the six Edgar Award finalists for Best Paperback Original, three were published by Seventh Street, and the winner was the press’ Rain Dogs by Adrian McKinty.
On June 7-9, a conference on "Women Criminals : Iconic Characters in History, Media and Crime Fiction" heads to the University of Rouen-Normandy. You can follow this link for the full program. It's in French, but if you don't read/speak the language, Google Chrome will translate it for you.
Scotland's Dundee University announced it will offer a postgraduate degree in crime fiction. The MLitt in crime writing and forensic investigation course will not only explore crime fiction, but help teach writers about the history of forensic science and its applications in solving crimes and as evidence in court. The course will begin in September this year and is being run as a collaboration between the university’s School of Humanities and its world-leading Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification.
The second issue of the new 'zine Occult Detective Quarterly is out, with nine original stories by Tim Waggoner, Steve Liskow, Tricia Owens, Edward M Erdelac, Brandon Barrows, Kelly A Harmon, Joshua M Reynolds, Mike Chinn, and Bruno Lombardi. (HT to Sandra Seamans)
Is the best crime fiction urban? John Banville (a/k/a Benjamin Black) thinks so.
Philip Rafferty stopped by the Crime Fiction Lover blog to list "The five books that got me hooked on crime fiction."
USA Today bestselling author Jennifer Jaynes took the Page 69 Test for her new stand-alone thriller The Stranger Inside.
Love steamy thrillers? The Strand Magazine has a list of ten of the "best."
This week, the featured crime poem at the 5-2 is "Turn the Camera Off" by Oral Nussbaum.
In the Q&A roundup, Criminal Element's John Valeri interviewed novelist and screenwriter Sarah Lotz about her latest crime novel, The White Road; Valeri also interrogated music journalist, film critic, and author Jordan Harper about his debut novel, She Rides Shotgun; A.J. Hartley, the internationally bestselling author of the Steeplejack series set in a fantasy version of South Africa, also answered Crime HQ's queries about his writing; the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine blog welcomed guest interviewer Scott Loring Sanders in conversation with Lisa Unger; Mystery People contributor and blogger Scott Butki chatted with Andrew Pyper about his supernatural psychological thriller The Only Child; and Writers Who Kill's E.B. Davis sat down with Sherry Harris to discuss the new book in her Sarah Winston Garage Sale Series, A Good Day To Buy.
Comments