Emma Styles won the £10,000 Wilbur Smith adventure writing prize with her "impressive" and "adrenaline-fuelled" debut novel, No Country for Girls. The Thelma and Louise-styled adventure thriller was also shortlisted for the CWA New Blood Dagger Award, the Davitt Award for Best Adult Crime Novel, and the Ned Kelly Award for Best Debut Crime Fiction. The annual Prize has three distinct categories designed to provide opportunities to published, unpublished and young writers. It is open to writers of any nationality, writing in English. Across the categories, the Prize received over 1,000 submissions from 67 different countries. (HT to Shots Magazine)
Texas Monthly profiled Houston's Murder by the Book, one of the nation's oldest and largest mystery specialty bookstores, established in 1980 by Martha Farrington and purchased by McKenna Jordan in 2009. The store also hosts bestselling authors on book tours, such as Don Winslow and Lou Berney and has a book subscription service. McKenna Jordan has a theory about the current popularity of crime fiction, or at least of “cozies,” mystery novels that tend to be less explicit and more old-fashioned, in which the nasty stuff occurs off the page. “Sales uptick in more difficult times, when maybe the overall climate that you’re living in is more stressful,” she says.
Speaking of cozies, Jane Sullivan, writing for the Sydney Morning Herald, offered up another opinion piece about whether Richard Osman’s cozy books a boon or disaster for crime fiction (after a BBC editorial expressed the same reservations, which I noted back in September), but the subgenre has been steadily gaining new fans over the past several years. The Critic magazine argued that the cozy side of crime fiction, as reflected in the Golden Age of "traditional" crime stories, was actually more authentic than its “gritty” successors. Meanwhile, Forbes Magazine recently offered up a list of "5 Cozy Mystery Series To Satisfy Your Wanderlust."
A new anthology of crime fiction is raising funds for polio eradication. The idea for the anthology of short stories, published in July 2023 as An Unnecessary Assassin, came to former librarian Lorraine Stevens last year at a literary festival in Yorkshire, England. The project includes stories by Ann Cleeves, Lee Child, David Penny, G.L. Waring, Chris McGeorge, Robert Scragg, F.D. Quinn, Judith O’Reilly, and Jim Taylor. Proceeds will be matched 2-to-1 by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
In the Q&A roundup, The Express chatted with Scottish author Val McDermid about her latest novel featuring cold case investigator Karen Pirie; the roots of her tabloid nickname; why Big Daddy might have regretted taking her on; and the vile abuse of women in the public eye. Lisa Haselton interviewed co-authors Breakfield and Burkey (Charles Breakfield and Rox Burkey) about their new technothriller, Enigma Tracer, the first of a planned trilogy in the "Enigma Heirs" series. Victoria Dowd spoke with Crime Time about her novel, Murder Most Cold, inspired by Golden Age Detective novels, Agatha Christie, and locked room mysteries. And The Real Book Spy welcomed New York Times bestselling author Simon Gervais to discuss The Last Guardian, his latest thriller featuring former secret service agent, Clayton White.
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