The Agatha Awards: BOOKS TO DIE FOR

I’m delighted to announce that BOOKS TO DIE FOR, edited by John Connolly, Clair Lamb and yours truly, has won the Agatha Award for Best Non-Fiction at the annual Malice Domestic convention.
  The Agatha Awards, for those of you unfamiliar with them, ‘honour the “traditional mystery.” That is to say, books best typified by the works of Agatha Christie as well as others.’
  It’s a considerable honour, and I’m particularly thrilled for John and Clair, but also for all the writers who contributed to BOOKS TO DIE FOR – it goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway, that this award belongs to every one of them as much as it does the book’s editors.
  For all the Agatha Awards shortlists and winners, clickety-click here.
  It’s been a real roller-coaster week for BOOKS TO DIE FOR. We were hugely honoured to be shortlisted for Thursday night’s Edgar Awards, and naturally we were disappointed not to win. That disappointment was offset on Friday by the news that BTDF has been shortlisted for the HRF Keating Award at Crimefest, where the book will find itself, again, in some very fine company. To wit:

Declan Burke & John Connolly for BOOKS TO DIE FOR (Hodder & Stoughton, 2012)
John Curran for AGATHA CHRISTIE’S SECRET NOTEBOOKS (HarperCollins, 2009)
Barry Forshaw (editor) for BRITISH CRIME WRITING: AN ENCYCLOPEDIA (Greenwood World Publishing, 2008)
Christopher Fowler for INVISIBLE INK (Strange Attractor, 2012)
Maxim Jakubowski (editor) for FOLLOWING THE DETECTIVES (New Holland Publishers, 2010)
P.D. James for TALKING ABOUT DETECTIVE FICTION (The Bodleian Library, 2009)

  Incidentally, I’ll be hosting a panel at Crimefest on BOOKS TO DIE FOR, featuring contributors Peter James, Yrsa Sigurdardottir and Brian McGilloway. If you’re going to be in Bristol that weekend, we’d love to see you there.

The Simple Art Of Murder One, Deceased

Bad news and good news, folks. Twenty Major gets in touch to let us know that Murder One, helmed by the legendary Maxim Jabukowski (right), is closing down, which is little short of a disaster, in terms of what it suggests for the immediate future of publishing, and particularly crime writing. Like, if London can’t even sustain one outlet offering the simple art of specialized books, what chance does anyone who isn’t a chainstore-friendly marquee name have of making any kind of splash?
  Hmmmm, he murmured, clenching his mental buttocks, it’s going to be a tough couple of years.
  On the plus side, Ken Bruen has blurbed Adrian McKinty’s forthcoming opus according to the 11th Commandment, or ‘Thou shalt not damn with faint praise’. To wit:

“Adrian McKinty has been blowing us out of the mystery water for quite some time now. THE BLOOMSDAY DEAD—superb, DEAD I WELL MAY BE, phew-oh, but he has totally taken over the whole field with FIFTY GRAND. Think Don Winslow’s masterly POWER OF THE DOG combined with José Latour and the sheer narrative drive of Joe Lansdale and you'll have some idea of this amazing novel. It has riveting mystery, politics of just about every shade, thrills on almost every page and the most compelling heroine in a Havana female detective named Mercado. I've rarely read a novel that had it all—human and drug trafficking, Hollywood excesses, illegals, ferocious vengeance—but what I found most compulsive was the wondrous compassion of the book. It moved me in ways I never anticipated. This is going to be the BIG BOOK of 2009.”—Ken Bruen, author of THE GUARDS

  Lovely, lovely, lovely. As I’ve said elsewhere in these pages, and on numerous occasions, McKinty’s a superb writer, in the top rank of his generation. I read FIFTY GRAND last April and thought it was his best novel since DEAD I WELL MAY BE, which was so good that I did what I almost never do and pulled the old Holden Caulfield bit and contacted McKinty and told him it was brilliant. Which it is.
  Anyway, if FIFTY GRAND doesn’t go gangbusters for McKinty this year, I’m buying a fedora so I can throw my hat at it. Because if writers like Adrian McKinty can’t make the whole writing thing work, even in the kind of climate that has Murder One closing down, then there’s something seriously and perversely wrong with the industry, and I don’t have a whole lot of interest in making it according to its warped values. Peace, out.