The recipients of this year’s Silver Falchion Awards were handed out during the recent Killer Nashville convention in Tennessee. There were some two dozen categories of contestants, but the main crime fiction-related winners included Best Cozy: Murder in Third Position, by Lori Robbins; Best Historical: Murder at the Galliano Club, by Carmen Amato; Best Investigator: Dead Drop, by James L'Etoile; Best Mystery: The Bone Records, by Rich Zahradnik; Best Thriller: One of Us Is Dead, by Jeneva Rose. In addition, the winner of the Claymore Award for best unpublished manuscript was Francois Roberge – The Fixer by Les Edgerton.
The winners were announced for the 2023 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. Founded in 1982 at San Jose State University in California, the competition challenges entrants to compose opening sentences to the worst of all possible novels. Of interest to crime fiction fans is the Grand Panjandrum's Special Award, which went to Daniel Bradford of Lexington, KY: "It was a sunny day in Los Angeles, hot and bright, and I was in my office, playing Mahjong against myself and losing, when she walked in, 120 pounds of dynamite, a blonde with legs that began at her ankles and ended in trouble." Julian Calvin of Atlanta, Georgia, won the Crime & Detective category for her offering, "The tall, slender seductress had Tom Pauley wrapped around her little finger, and she had James McGee hanging from a necklace, but the police were still waiting for the lab results to determine whose body parts she had used to make her earrings and that stunning tennis bracelet." You can read all the category winners and "dishonorable mentions" here.
Noir at the Bar returns Sept 24 at the Mandrake Bar in Los Angeles. Host Eric Beetner will be joined by authors Halley Sutton, Lawrence Allan, Amulya Malladi, Pamela Samuels Young, Howard Kaplan, Ilyn Welch, and more as they read from their work.
Crime Reads featured Karen Pierce, author of a new cookbook that looks at Agatha Christie's characters and their relationship to food (with recipes!).
This week's crime poem at the 5-2 Weekly is "Queen's Hawker" by Rena J. Worley.
In the Q&A roundup, bestselling author Kathy Reichs spoke with The Globe and Mail about writing while working full time, forensic science and how her Temperance Brennan series might end; and crime writer Steve Cavanagh chatted with the Irish Examiner about his latest novel, Kill For Me, Kill For You, and the nature of revenge.
Comments