A Highly Peculier Assortment

Notable new crime-fiction authors join a clutch of old hands in the competition for this year’s Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award. The longlist of rivals, posted today in Shotsmag Confidential, looks like this:

• Time of Death, by Mark Billingham (Little, Brown)
• Rain Dogs, by Adrian McKinty (Serpent’s Tail)
• Career of Evil, by Robert Galbraith (Sphere)
• Black-Eyed Susans, by Julia Heaberlin (Michael Joseph)
• Disclaimer, by Renée Knight (Black Swan)
• I Let You Go, by Clare Mackintosh (Sphere)
• The Moth Catcher, by Ann Cleeves (Pan)
• Tell No Tales, by Eva Dolan (Harvill Secker)
• The Ghost Fields, by Elly Griffiths (Quercus)
• The Missing and the Dead, by Stuart MacBride (HarperCollins)
• Every Night I Dream of Hell, by Malcolm Mackay (Mantle)
• Splinter the Silence, by Val McDermid (Little, Brown)
• The Glorious Heresies, by Lisa McInerney (John Murray)
• The Nightmare Place, by Steve Mosby (Orion)
• The Final Silence, by Stuart Neville (Harvill Secker)
• In a Dark, Dark Wood, by Ruth Ware (Harvill Secker)
• Death Is a Welcome Guest, by Louise Welsh (John Murray)
• Stasi Child, by David Young (Twenty7)

As Shotsmag explains, these 18 titles were “selected by an academy of crime-writing authors, agents, editors, reviewers, members of the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival Programming Committee, and representatives from T&R Theakston Ltd. and [bookseller] W.H. Smith.” A shortlist of just half a dozen titles will be announced on May 31. A public online vote, conducted between July 1 and 15, will help determine this contest’s ultimate winner. The name of that book and author will be declared on July 21 during opening-night festivities at this year’s Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival (July 21-24 in Harrogate, England).