From Pillar to Post

• Laura Lippman’s What the Dead Know has won a 2007 Quill Book Award in the Mystery/Suspense/Thriller category. That’s one of 19 types of Quill commendations, the winners in each category reportedly chosen by “more than 6,000 booksellers and librarians” on behalf of the Quill Foundation, a group of media organizations promoting literacy.

The four other nominees in this category were: The Collaborator of Bethlehem, by Matt Beynon Rees; Body of Lies, by David Ignatius; The Overlook, by Michael Connelly; and A Welcome Grave, by Michael Koryta. Additional awards were announced for The Thirteenth Tale, by Diane Setterfield (Debut Author); The Road, by Cormac McCarthy (General Fiction); The Assault on Reason, by Al Gore (History/Current Events/Politics); and Einstein: His Life and Universe, by Walter Isaacson (Biography/Memoir).

The full list can be perused here.

Winners will be presented with their prizes during a “gala awards ceremony” to be held on October 22 at New York City’s Lincoln Center, hosted by NBC Today show personalities Ann Curry and Al Roker. That ceremony will be televised by NBC stations on the night of Saturday, October 27.

• Irish playwright and novelist Declan Hughes (who was interviewed by January Magazine this past summer) is the subject of Declan Burke’s latest “Ya Wanna Do It Here or Down the Station, Punk?” mini-Q&A at Crime Always Pays. In addition to touting Edmund Crispin’s Gervais Fen books and nominating Nicholas Blake’s The Private Wound (1968) as the “Best Irish Crime Novel,” Hughes muses on which work of crime fiction he would most like to have written himself:

It’s a toss-up between The Glass Key by Dashiell Hammett and The Galton Case by Ross Macdonald. Hammett’s book, the first crime--as opposed to detective--novel, remains a marvel for its style, its complex, cynical grasp of urban politics and its deft exploration of manners, a crucial area for the hard-boiled as much as the cosy side of the house. The Galton Case is The Great Gatsby of crime novels, with its inquiry into the father-son legacy, personal self-reinvention and the limits of the American dream; Macdonald squared the circle of hard-boiled action and social/psychological comment with masterful plotting. I honestly believe he’s still The Master; no-one else has even come close.

Read all of that Q&A here.

• “The game is afoot!” Of course, that’s a memorable bit of Sherlock Holmes dialogue lifted from Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Abbey Grange.” But as Brian Skupin notes at Bookflings, the phrase has a still more complex and interesting etymology. Read his findings here.

• While we’re on the subject of interviews, let me point out John Kenyon’s quizzing of Allan Guthrie, the author of Hard Man and the winner of this year’s Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award. At Kenyon’s Things I’d Rather Be Doing, the Scottish novelist talks about his use of violence in fiction, the years he spent struggling to get published, and the screenplay he’s written of Two-Way Split. Click here for the complete exchange.

• And while we’re talking about violence, Sharon Wildwind remarks on the necessity of its judicious use, in a post at Poe’s Deadly Daughters. You’ll find that here.

• Finally, Diana Killian (Sonnet of the Sphinx) recalls with unexpected fondness one of the weirdest and least likely detective series to find a place on U.S. TV schedules.