Coleman Seizes Another Shamus

Directly on the heels of news about this year’s David Thompson Special Service Award recipient comes word (via The Gumshoe Site) that Long Island, New York, author Reed Farrel Coleman’s Where It Hurts (Putnam)—his book introducing former Suffolk County cop Gus Murphy—has won the 2017 Shamus Award for Best Private Eye Novel. This marks the fourth time Coleman has scored a Shamus; the first was in 2006, when his Moe Prager novel The James Deans received Best Private Eye Paperback Original honors.

Also in contention for the 2017 Best P.I. Novel prize—which is sponsored by the Private Eye Writers of America (PWA)—were The Graveyard of the Hesperides, by Lindsey Davis (Minotaur); Fields Where They Lay, by Timothy Hallinan (Soho Crime); With 6 You Get Wally, by Al Lamanda (Gale Cengage); and The Stardom Affair, by Robert S. Levinson (Five Star).

Ordinarily this announcement would have been made during a special Shamus Awards Dinner held in concert with Bouchercon. However, there will be no such celebration at this October’s Bouchercon in Toronto, Ontario (it was cancelled in July); Gumshoe Site editor Jiro Kimura reports that Coleman’s victory was instead broadcast “in the fall issue of the PWA newsletter.” That same bulletin declares the winners of three other 2017 Shamus accolades:

Best Original Private Eye Paperback: The Perplexing Theft of the Jewel in the Crown, by Vaseem Khan (Red Hook)

Also nominated: The Detective and the Chinese High-Fin, by Michael Craven (HarperCollins); Hold Me, Babe, by O’Neil De Noux (Big Kiss); The Knife Slipped, by Erle Stanley Gardner (Hard Case Crime); and My Bad, by Manuel Ramos (Arte Publico Press).

Best First Private Eye Novel: IQ, by Joe Ide (Little, Brown)

Also nominated: Fever City, by Tim Baker (Europa Editions); Deep Six, by D.P. Lyle (Oceanview); The Second Girl, by David Swinson (Little, Brown); and Soho Sins, by Richard Vine (Hard Case Crime).

Best Private Eye Short Story: “A Battlefield Reunion,” by Brendan DuBois (Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, June 2016)

Also nominated: “Keller’s Fedora,” by Lawrence Block (LB
Productions e-book); “Stairway from Heaven,” by Åke Edwardson
(from Stockholm Noir, edited by Nathan Larson and Carl-Michael Edenborg; Akashic); “A Dangerous Cat,” by Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins (The Strand Magazine, February-May 2016); and “Archie on Loan,” by Dave Zeltserman (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, September-October 2016).

Congratulations to all of the nominees.

READ MORE: “Kennealy Savors the Spotlight,” by J. Kingston Pierce (The Rap Sheet).