Best of Britain

I guess I didn’t choose the ideal time to take a little pre-summer vacation, at least so far as crime-fiction-related news was concerned. Because while I was away in Quebec City, Canada, for most of a week, touring that town’s historic quarter, sampling French cuisine, and reading a couple of delightful books (Tim Mason’s new The Nightingale Affair and Richard Russo’s forthcoming Somebody’s Fool), announcements were made regarding two sets of genre awards.

First off, the British Crime Writers’ Association released its shortlists of contenders for the 2023 Daggers, in 10 categories.

Gold Dagger:
• The Kingdoms of Savannah, by George Dawes Green (Headline)
• The Lost Man of Bombay, by Vaseem Khan (Hodder & Stoughton)
• A Killing in November, by Simon Mason (Riverrun)
• The Clockwork Girl, by Anna Mazzola (Orion)
• The Winter Guest, by W.C. Ryan (Zaffre)
• The Silent Brother, by Simon Van der Velde (Northodox Press)

Ian Fleming Steel Dagger:
• Take Your Breath Away, by Linwood Barclay (HQ)
• Seventeen, by John Brownlow (Hodder & Stoughton)
• The Botanist, by M.W. Craven (Constable)
• The Ink Black Heart, by Robert Galbraith (Sphere)
• Alias Emma, by Ava Glass (Century)
• May God Forgive, by Alan Parks (Canongate)

ILP John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger:
• Breaking, by Amanda Cassidy (Canelo)
• The Local, by Joey Hartstone (Pushkin Vertigo)
• London in Black, by Jack Lutz (Pushkin Vertigo)
• Dirt Town, by Hayley Scrivenor (Macmillan)
• No Country for Girls, by Emma Styles (Sphere)
• Outback, by Patricia Wolf (Embla)

Historical Dagger:
• The Darkest Sin, by D.V. Bishop (Macmillan)
• The Clockwork Girl, by Anna Mazzola (Orion)
• The Homes, by J.B. Mylet (Viper)
• The Bangalore Detectives Club, by Harini Nagendra (Constable)
• Blue Water, by Leonora Nattrass (Viper)
• Hear No Evil, by Sarah Smith (Two Roads)

Crime Fiction in Translation Dagger:
• Good Reasons to Die, by Morgan Audic,
translated by Sam Taylor (Mountain Leopard Press)
• The Red Notebook, by Michel Bussi,
translated by Vineet Lal (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
• Even the Darkest Night, by Javier Cercas,
translated by Anne McLean (MacLehose Press)
• Bad Kids, by Zijin Chen,
translated by Michelle Deeter (Pushkin Vertigo)
• The Bleeding, by Johana Gustawsson,
translated by David Warriner (Orenda)
• The Anomaly, by Hervé Le Tellier,
translated by Adriana Hunter (Michael Joseph)

Short Story Dagger:
• “The Disappearance,” by Leigh Bardugo (from Marple; HarperCollins)
• “The Tears of Venus,” by Victoria Dowd and Delilah Dowd (from Unlocked; The D20 Authors)
• “The Beautiful Game,” by Sanjida Kay (from The Perfect Crime, edited by Vaseem Khan and Maxim Jakubowski; HarperCollins)
• “Paradise Lost,” by Abir Mukherjee (from The Perfect Crime)
• “Runaway Blues,” by C.J. Tudor (from A Sliver of Darkness, by C.J. Tudor; Michael Joseph)
• “Cast a Long Shadow,” by Hazell Ward Cast (from Cast a Long Shadow, edited by Katherine Stansfield and Caroline; Honno Welsh Women’s Press)

ALCS Gold Dagger for Non-fiction:
• The Poisonous Solicitor: The True Story of a 1920s Murder Mystery, by Stephen Bates (Icon)
• The Life of Crime: Detecting the History of Mysteries and Their Creators, by Martin Edwards (Collins Crime Club)
• Unlawful Killings: Life, Love and Murder: Trials at the Old Bailey, by Wendy Joseph (Doubleday)
• Tremors in the Blood: Murder, Obsession and the Birth of the Lie Detector, by Amit Katwala (Mudlark)
• To Hunt a Killer: How I Brought Melanie Road’s Murderer to Justice, by Julie Mackay and Robert Murphy (Harper Element)
• About A Son: A Murder and A Father’s Search for Truth, by David Whitehouse (Phoenix)

Dagger in the Library (“for a body of work by an established crime writer that has long been popular with borrowers from libraries”):
• Ben Aaronovitch
• Sophie Hannah
• Mick Herron

Publishers’ Dagger (“awarded annually to the Best Crime and Mystery Publisher of the Year”):
• Harper Fiction (HarperCollins)
• Mantle (PanMacmillan)
• Michael Joseph (Penguin Random House)
• Pushkin Vertigo (Pushkin Press)
• Quercus (Hachette)
• Viper (Profile Books)

Debut Dagger (“for the opening of a crime novel by an
unpublished writer”):
• Bulldog Murphy, by Chris Corbett
• Male, Unknown, by Chris Griffiths
• Sideways, by Jeff Marsick
• Heist, by James Pierson
• The Line of Least Resistance, by Jeff Richards
• Cradle of Storms, by Margaret Winslow

The longlists of candidates for these prizes can be found here.

This year’s Dagger Award winners are to be declared on Thursday, July 6, during an event at the Leonardo City Hotel in London.

American author Walter Mosley was previously named as the recipient of the 2023 Diamond Dagger Award.

In addition, the UK-based Margery Allingham Society, in association with the CWA, has announced the winner of the 2023 Margery Allingham Short Mystery Prize. It is journalist-turned-novelist Judith O’Reilly, for her story “How to Catch a Bullet in a Plate.”

Still to come: the winners of this year’s CrimeFest Awards.