Martina Cole is the latest recipient of the highest honor in British crime writing, the Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) Diamond Dagger. The long-reigning Queen of Crime Drama has written 25 novels and become Britain’s bestselling female crime writer and the first British female adult audience novelist to break the £50 million sales mark. Her books have been translated into 31 languages and adapted for multiple stage plays and television series. Previous Diamond Dagger winners include Ruth Rendell, Lee Child, Ann Cleeves, Ian Rankin, PD James, Colin Dexter, Reginald Hill, Lindsey Davies, Peter Lovesey, and John Le Carré.
The nominees for the 2021 Norwegian Silver Knife for outstanding crime fiction have been announced. The contenders include The Assistant by Kjell Ola Dahl; So It Got Cold by Frode Eie Larsen; and Fate Stone by Sven Petter Næss. The winner will be announced on 16 March 2021. (HT to Shots Magazine) Previous winners include Lars Helle (2018), Kurt Aust and Kin Wessel (2019) and Agnes Matre (2020).
In an email this week, the Malice Board of Directors announced they'd decided to postpone Malice 32/33 to 2022. Instead of a live event in 2021, they will be sponsoring MORE THAN MALICE, a virtual (online) festival to be held on July 14 - 17, 2021. The event will feature special guests, unique panels, the Agatha Awards, and much more. Agatha Award nomination forms will also be sent out this week to everyone who is currently registered for Malice Domestic.
Hillary Clinton is teaming up with award-winning author, Louise Penny, to write an international political thriller in which a secretary of state joins the administration of "a president inaugurated after four years of American leadership that shrank from the world stage." The book will be published in the UK and worldwide by Pan Macmillan, and by Simon & Schuster and St Martin’s Press in the US. In a statement, Clinton described writing with Penny as "a dream come true." The move follows a partnership between President Bill Clinton and James Patterson to pen the thriller, The President is Missing.
Scotland's Granite Noir conference just wrapped up February 19-21, and organizers have put online several of the virtual author events, with sign language included for the hearing impaired. Participating authors include Ian Rankin, Stuart MacBride, Attica Locke, Jo Nesbo, David Baldacci, and more.
On Al-Fanar Media, M. Lynx Qualey chatted with Nadia Ghanem, a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at University of London's SOAS, about the evolution of crime fiction in the Maghreb (discussing, for example, works by authors from Algeria, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia). (HT to Elizabeth Foxwell)
Mystery Writers of America shared the sad news that Margaret Maron (1938-2021), a past president, former Grand Master, Edgar winner, and a truly kind and generous writer, has passed away from a stroke. Maron is the author of numerous short stories and more than twenty mystery novels, including the Judge Deborah Knott series and another series with Sigrid Harald, a loner lieutenant in the NYPD whose policeman father was killed in the line of duty when she was a toddler. Maron was also one of the founders of Sisters in Crime and the American Crime Writers' League.
Featured at the Page 69 Test was The Missing Passenger by Jack Heath. From the publisher: Jarli only narrowly escaped death after his world-shattering app made him infamous. Now there’s a new foe afoot and Jarli is far from safe in this thrilling sequel to The Truth App.
If you're like moi and many others, the pandemic lockdowns have led to quite a bit of comfort-food noshing. So it's probably appropriate that Criminal Element's Amy Pershing took on the topic of mysteries in which food, both for good and evil, features so prominently that it’s virtually a character itself—or at least a character witness. Perhaps it’s because food (the cooking of it, the eating of it, the sharing of it) offers so many lovely options for the mystery writer. Apparently, classic crime fiction was also obsessed with fashion.
The latest crime poem at the 5-2 Weekly is "The Snap" by James Lilley.
In the Q&A roundup, Dana Stabenow chatted with Criminal Element about her long-running Kate Shugak series and also a series with Alaska State Trooper Liam Campbell; the Sons of Spade blog welcomed Alexandra Amor, a podcaster and author of the Freddie Lark series, to chat about her work and PI fiction in general; and Writers Who Kill's E.B. Davis spoke with Barbara Ross about Shucked Apart, the ninth book in the Maine Clambake mystery series.