The Crime Writers Association of North America announced the winner of the 2022 Dashiell Hammett Award for Literary Excellence in Crime Writing is Samantha Jayne Allen for Pay Dirt Road. The novel, described as "Friday Night Lights meets Mare of Easttown" is a small-town mystery about an unlikely private investigator searching for a missing waitress. It's Allen's debut novel, which also won the 2019 Tony Hillerman Prize and was recently nominated for a Shamus Award for Best First Novel by the Private Eye Writers of America. The other Hammett finalists were Copperhead Road, by Brad Smith (At Bay Press); Gangland, by Chuck Hogan (Grand Central); Don’t Know Tough, by Eli Cranor (Soho Crime); and What Happened to the Bennetts, by Lisa Scottoline (Putnam).
In recognition of the legacy of Shirley Jackson’s writing, and with permission of the author’s estate, The Shirley Jackson Awards were established for outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic. The awards are voted on by a jury of professional writers, editors, critics, and academics and given for the best work published in the preceding calendar year in the following categories: Novel, Novella, Novelette, Short Fiction, Single-Author Collection, and Edited Anthology. You can check out all of those nominees via this link. Winners will be presented in-person on Saturday, July 15 at 8pm at Readercon 32, Conference on Imaginative Literature, in Quincy, Massachusetts.
Noir at the Bar in DC returns tonight, June 29, at 7pm, at the Looking Glass Lounge on Georgia Avenue, with Ed Aymar taking on hosting duties. Authors scheduled to read from their works include S.A.Cosby, Angie Kim, Cheryl Head, Eryk Pruitt, and Art Taylor, along with music by Sara Jones.
New York's Grolier Club will feature the exhibition, "Whodunit? Key Books in Detective Fiction," November 30, 2023 - February 10, 2024, showcasing significant and unusual mystery works from the more than 400-piece collection of Grolier Club member, Jeffrey Johnson. The detective novels, mostly from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, include The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle, The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie, and The G-String Murders by Gypsy Rose Lee, often thought to be ghosted by Craig Rice. (HT to The Bunburyist)
This week's crime poem at the 5-2 Weekly is "Seventy-Eight Dollars" by Peter Mladinic.
In the Q&A roundup, Chris Brookmyre stopped by the Shots Magazine blog to talk about his writing and offer up some of his favorite books; Indie Crime Scene interviewed Kathleen Kaska, whose novel Murder at the Pontchartrain had its debut on June 28th; and Crime Fiction Lover chatted with Sarah Hilary, winner of Theakston’s 2015 Crime Novel of the Year, about her latest standalone psychological thriller, Black Thorn, set in the south west of England.
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