The shortlists were announced for the 2020 Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year:
My Sister The Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite
Worst Case Scenario by Helen Fitzgerald
The Lost Man by Jane Harper
Joe Country by Mick Herron
The Chain by Adrian McKinty
Smoke And Ashes by Abir Mukherjee
Readers can vote online for the novel they feel most deserves to be crowned the 2020 best of the best up through July 19, with the winner to be revealed in a digital awards ceremony on July 23.
Bouchercon, the world mystery convention, announced the nominees for its annual Anthony Award. Due to the cancellation of the conference in Sacramento, this year's voting will take place during Virtual Bouchercon, October 16–7, 2020, with the awards presented as part of an online ceremony on October 17. You can see all of the nominated books and authors via the official Bouchercon website, including those for Best Novel: Your House Will Pay, by Steph Cha; They All Fall Down, by Rachel Howzell Hall; Lady in the Lake, by Laura Lippman; The Murder List, by Hank Phillippi Ryan; and Miami Midnight, by Alex Segura.
The Private Eye Writers of America announced the Shamus Award Finalists for titles published in 2019. Winners will be determined from those listed in the categories of Best Original Private Eye Paperback, Best Private Eye Short Story, and Best Private Eye Novel. The ceremony is usually held in conjunction with the annual Bouchercon Conference, although since that event has been canceled due to the coronavirus, there will likely be a virtual ceremony later in the year.
Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) Daggers, among the oldest awards in the genre, announced the longlists for 2020, with shortlists to be narrowed down later in the year before the awards ceremony takes place on October 22. The 2020 Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement, the highest honor in British crime writing, has already been chosen and will be awarded to Martin Edwards on that night. The CWA has also announced that Della Millward won the 2020 CWA Margery Allingham Short Mystery Prize for "A Time to Confess." (Also "highly commended" were Lauren Everdell for "Voices" and Laila Murphy for "Sting in the Tail").
Two Crime Writers and a Microphone (the podcast team of Steve Cavanagh and Luca Veste) are presenting The Locked Up Festival! online July 2-4, raising money for the Trussell Trust. There will be a host of panels, streamed live on Zoom, featuring the world's best crime writers including Anthony Horowitz, Val McDermid, Abir Mukherjee, Richard Osman, Ruth Ware, Don Winslow, Alex North, Mark Billingham, S J Watson, Chris Brookmyre, Denise Mina, Shari Lapena, Adrian McKinty, and Linwood Barclay, among others. The panels will include a few on the light-hearted side such as "The Worst Book Event of My Life," "TV Heaven and Hell," and "The Zoom of Blues." Tickets are limited, so to register, follow this link.
Sadly, we lost another member of the crime fiction community recently. Mystery author Grace Edwards published her first mystery when she 64 and went on to write five more detective stories set in Harlem against a backdrop of jazz, featuring a savvy, style-conscious amateur sleuth named Mali Anderson. Edwards was 87 and had suffered from declining health and dementia.
Book organizations and bookstores have been offering support during the recent black lives matter demonstrations. Jeannine Cook, owner of Harriett's Bookshop in Philadelphia, headed to City Hall to offer free books (Kate Clifford Larson's Bound for the Promised Land; Harriet Tubman: Portrait of an American Hero; and The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley) to the hundreds of protesters who poured into the streets. John Evans and Allison Reid, co-owners of DIESEL, A Bookstore highlighted numerous options for helping the cause, as well as some suggested reads and for those interested in donating, a list of organizations "that have maintained a mostly decades-long commitment to exactly these issues, working in the trenches to improve fatally unjust structures of our society." Publishers Weekly also has a list of black-owned bookstores you can help promote and support. (HT to Shelf Awareness)
The official Help Save Uncle Hugo's Fund has raised some $123,000 of its goal of $500,000 to help build Uncle Hugo's Science Fiction Bookstore and Uncle Edgar's Mystery Bookstore which were burned to the ground in the early days of the Minneapolis protests against the murder of George Floyd. The bookstore owner's son, Sam Blyly-Strauss, has been providing updates, noting that his father isn't sure yet whether he's going to rebuild on the same site, buy or rent a different building and relocate, or switch to a mail-order business from his home. Blyly-Strauss added that in the next week his father plans to start selling Uncle Hugo's and Uncle Edgar's T-shirts and sweatshirts that were ordered before the fire and arrived at his house this week.
The next issue of Mystery Readers Journal will focus on Senior Sleuths, and editor Janet Rudolph is seeking reviews, articles, and Author! Author! essays. The deadline for submissions is July 1st.
The latest crime poem at the 5-2 Weekly is "Edward G. Robinson in Public Domain" by Matthew Sorrento.
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