Crime of the Crop

For the second year in a row, Court TV is holding a competition to find the “Next Great Crime Writer.” However, with its previous co-sponsor, the HarperCollins imprint ReganBooks, having gone out of business (following fervid criticism over its plans to publish O.J. Simpson’s If I Did It), the cable network has turned this time to bookseller Borders and the social-networking Web site Gather to get the word out.

The process for selecting a winner sounds pretty straightforward:

From October 1 through November 11, aspiring mystery/crime writers can submit a full-length fiction manuscript for consideration. Throughout the contest, authors will post their 1st chapters of their manuscript in the Court TV Search for the Next Great Crime Writer Contest group. These chapters will be rated by the Gather community and the Gather Editorial Team, and five finalists will be selected through two rounds of rating. (See our rating guidelines.) One Grand Prize Winner will then be chosen for publication by a panel of judges, some of which are bestselling authors in the genre!

Those judges will include David Baldacci, Sandra Brown, and Harlan Coben, all of whom are also slated to appear, together with 10 other crime writers, in the second season of Court TV’s Murder By the Book, which premieres on Monday, November 5, at 10 p.m. ET/PT. Whoever they deem to have submitted the most promising novel-length manuscript will receive a $5,000 grand prize (up from last year’s award of $1,000), plus “a publishing and exclusive distribution contract with Borders, Inc.”

When the Gather folks first e-mailed me about this event, I was skeptical. After all, I’d mentioned last year’s heavily promoted competition in The Rap Sheet--only to subsequently hear absolutely nothing about who won, or what happened to that victor’s manuscript. The whole thing seemed like a largely disregarded stepchild to the Murder By the Book promo planning. Consequently, I wasn’t jumping at the chance to talk about “Search” II.

However, with some help from the Gather folks, I have since made contact with the winner of last year’s “Search for the Next Great Crime Writer.” His name is Hal McDonald, and he’s a professor of English at Mars Hill College in North Carolina. His winning story, A Simple Case of Revenge (since retitled The Anatomists), was set in 1825 London and concerned a pair of medical students who, according to the Court TV site, “hire a resurrectionist to provide them a cadaver, who, they find, did not die of natural causes. Their covert investigation of the case unearths the identity of the dead man--Lady Abigail Darcy, buried just yesterday after a ‘natural’ death.” (A synopsis and sample chapter of McDonald’s book can be found here.) McDonald was kind enough to answer a few of my questions concerning his contest victory:

Q: What have you done with your win in last year’s “Next Great Crime Writer” contest? Has it really opened doors for you that you couldn’t have walked through otherwise?

A: While winning the contest didn’t transform my life overnight (I’m still teaching the same four-course English load as before, and wouldn’t have it any other way), my attitude toward writing has certainly changed. Before the contest, I approached fiction-writing as a rather abstract, hypothetical thing--working really hard at writing stories that more than likely would never be read by anybody. But winning the contest, and having the book published suddenly made it all very tangibly real for me, and as a result, [have] given me a new burst of creative energy. I no longer feel like I’m writing in a vacuum, and there’s no way I’d be in this position right now had it not been for Court TV’s contest.

Q: Are you now completing the manuscript you first offered to the contest judges, or have you turned instead to a different novel-writing project?

A: I completed The Anatomists manuscript back in April, and spent the summer polishing it up for publication; it’s scheduled to come out next spring. Currently, I’m hard at work on a sequel (in between teaching my classes, of course).

Q: Every new contest presents challenges: organizational snags, the pressure of submission deadlines, and the matter last year of only $1,000 in prize money. Looking back, are you satisfied with how everything went, overall?

A: I can’t imagine any way the whole process could have been more positive and pleasant than it actually turned out.

Finally, I tried to ask McDonald--via e-mail--whether he objected to contest terms dictated by Court TV, which, as I read them, require that he allow the network to use his submission (if not his completed manuscript) in perpetuity as a promotional device, without paying him additional money. But he didn’t answer that specific query, instead concluding with the following statement: “I’m extremely grateful to Court TV for providing me with this opportunity. The novel itself evolved in some unexpected ways while I was writing it, so the submitted portion is not entirely accurate any more.”

After going through all of this, I still can’t tell whether participating in the “Next Great Crime Writer” competition is everything its sponsors make it out to be. Perhaps we won’t know the answer to that until we have a better read on Hal McDonald’s future career as a novelist. And the publishing prospects of this year’s winner.

For complete rules and the answers to frequently asked questions about this Court TV contest, click here.