The Strand Magazine announced the winners of the 2020 Strand Critics Awards via an online Zoom event, with Andrew Guilli and Hank Phillipi taking on hosting duties. The annual awards recognize excellence in the field of mystery fiction and publishing. The winners are listed below, and you can check out all the finalists via this link:
- Life Time Achievement Awards: Tess Gerritsen and Walter Mosley
- Best Murder Novel: The Sentence is Death by Anthony Horowitz
- Best Debut Novel: Miracle Creek by Angie Kim
- Publisher of the Year: Bronwen Hruska of Soho Press
The deadline to submit to the William F. Deeck-Malice Domestic Grant for Unpublished Writers is November 1st at 11:59 p.m. EST. Founded in 1993, the grant program is designed to foster quality Malice Domestic literature and to assist mystery authors on the road to publication. Writers must not have published a book, short story, or dramatic work in the mystery field, either in print, electronic, or audio form. The grant includes a $2,500 award plus a comprehensive registration for the upcoming convention and two nights’ lodging at the convention hotel. For more information, check out this link.
The International Thriller Writers and the Bouchercon crime festival have responded and regrouped following recent controversies surrounding racism and sexual harassment. In response to what many authors felt was an inadequate response to the issues on the part of the ITW, all but two members resigned from ITW's board in June. Some of the changes since then began when ITW members voted on a slate of 11 mystery and thriller authors who will join its board beginning in mid-October (half male, half female); a new diversity and outreach committee was created, headed by incoming board member Alexia Gordon; and a security and safety committee is drafting a comprehensive process for dealing with violations of its code of conduct policies. Because the sexual assault event occurred at the 2019 Bouchercon, that organization has also recently revised its Code of Conduct and Anti-Harassment Policy to make it more comprehensive and easier for victims to come forward.
I was sorry to learn of the deaths recently of two mystery authors. Gary Alexander passed away at the age of 79 after a short battle with cancer. Gary wrote 24 novels and some 200 short stories, including his most recent novel, Harry Saves the World Again. We also lost Dorothy Simpson at the age of 87. Dorothy's first book was the suspense novel, Harbingers of Fear, which was published in 1977, followed by installments in the Inspector Thanet series. (HT to Martin Edwards and Janet Rudolph)
Writing for CrimeReads, David Heska Wanbli Weiden, an enrolled citizen of the Sicangu Lakota Nation and author of the thriller, Winter Counts, discussed "Why Indigenous Crime Fiction Matters."
Attention, crime writers: there was some interesting forensic science news last week. Search teams looking for human remains are often slowed by on-foot pursuits or aerial searches that are obscured by forest cover. But researchers could use tree cover in body recovery missions to their advantage by detecting changes in the plant's chemistry as signals of nearby human remains.
The latest crime poem at the 5-2 Weekly is "Crow" by Tad Tuleja.
In the Q&A roundup, the Sunday Post sat down with Andrew James Greig, one of the newest authors in Scotland’s Tartan Noir crime fiction scene; Writers Who Kill's E. B. Davis chatted with author Ellen Byron about her Cajun Country mysteries; Vanessa Lillie stopped by Deborah Kalb's blog to discuss her new thriller, For the Best; this week's guest on Author Interviews was Gerald Elias, chatting about his new thriller, The Beethoven Sequence; and Lisa Haselton interviewed thriller author Virginia Crow about her new novel, Baptism of Fire.
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