Keeping It All in the Family

Because I was away from my office all of yesterday, it’s only this morning that I am finally able to post the news that Liam McIlvanney, an academic in New Zealand and the son of legendary Scottish crime writer William McIlvanney (Laidlaw), has won the Scottish award named in honor of his late father. It was announced during Friday’s opening reception at the Bloody Scotland International Crime Writing Festival in Stirling, that the younger McIlvanney’s most recent novel, a serial-killer yarn titled The Quaker (HarperCollins), was chosen to receive the 2018 McIlvanney Prize for crime book of the year.

Also vying for this year’s McIlvanney Prize were Follow the Dead, by Lin Anderson (Macmillan); Places in the Darkness, by Chris Brookmyre (Little, Brown); and The Man Between, by Charles Cumming (HarperCollins). Congratulations to them, as well as McIlvanney.

Previous recipients of the McIlvanney Prize are Denise Mina (for The Long Drop in 2017), Chris Brookmyre (for Black Widow in 2016), Craig Russell (for The Ghosts of Altona in 2015), Peter May (for Entry Island in 2014), Malcolm Mackay (for How a Gunman Says Goodbye in 2013), and Charles Cumming (for A Foreign Country in 2012).

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Meanwhile, Mystery Fanfare reports, “Abir Mukherjee has won the 2018 Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize (£15,000) with his second novel, A Necessary Evil (Vintage). The historical crime tale, set in India in 1920, sees Captain Wyndham and Sergeant Banerjee of the Calcutta Police Force investigate the assassination of a Maharajah's son.”