Surprises and Prizes Galore

Directly on the heels of this week’s announcement regarding winners of the 2024 British Dagger Awards come notices about five additional prizes of interest to Rap Sheet readers.

First off, the Killer Nashville convention has released its lists of top choices for the 2024 Silver Falchion Awards. There are 17 categories of contenders; below are books vying for Best Mystery honors.

• Mouse in the Box, by Lewis Allan (‎Stretched Studio)
• Three Strides Out, by V.S. Anderson (Virginia S. Anderson)
• Parallel Secrets, by M.L. Barrs (Wild Rose Press)
• Indigo Road, by Reed Bunzel (Coffeetown Press)
• Play the Fool, by Lina Chern (Bantam)
• Kaleidoscope of Secrets, by Sandy Clements
(Independently published)
• Beautiful Death, by John Deal (Dark Lake Press)
• Murder at the Royal Albert, by Gerald Elias (Level Best)
• Black Cordite, White Snow, by Nate Granzow (Independently published)
• The Smoking Gun in Music City, by Gerry Hyder (Gerry Hyder)
• Secrets Don’t Sink, by K.B. Jackson (Level Best)
• BeatNikki’s Café, by Renee James (Amble Press)
• Mourning Bay, by Kay Jennings (Paris Communications)
• Missing Clarissa, by Ripley Jones (Wednesday)
• The School of Homer, by Alexander Marriott (Vanguard Press)
• The Empty Kayak, by Jodé Millman (Level Best)
• Hollywood, by Howard Owen (Permanent Press)
• Backstabbed on Broadway, by Carolyn Quinn (Blue Topaz)
• The Last Thing Claire Wanted, by Karin Fitz Sanford (Level Best)
• Vendetta in the Valley, by Drew Strickland (Independently published)

Killer Nashville has also made known its top picks for this year’s Claymore Award, a commendation given for the “best first 50 pages of an unpublished manuscript, play, or screenplay.” Click right here to see those fortunate competitors.

A list of finalists for the Silver Falchion Awards and Claymore Awards is expected sometime soon. Winners will be revealed during a Killer Nashville Awards Dinner on August 23, in Nashville, Tennessee.

* * *

Next we have the nominees for the 2023 Shirley Jackson Awards, named for the author of The Haunting of Hill House, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and other acckauned works of horror and mystery fiction. These annual awards recognize “outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic.” There are six divisions of candidates for these prizes; here are those in contention for Best Novel:

• Brainwyrms, by Alison Rumfitt (Nightfire)
• The Daughters of Block Island, by Christa Carmen (Thomas & Mercer)
• Don’t Fear the Reaper, by Stephen Graham Jones (Saga Press U.S./Titan UK)
• Every Version Ends in Death, by Aliya Chaudhry (Haunt)
• The Militia House, by John Milas (Henry Holt)
• The Reformatory, by Tananarive Due (Saga Press U.S./Titan UK)

These prizes are to be presented on July 13 during the Readercon 33 conference on Imaginative Literature, in Quincy, Massachusetts.

* * *

The Munsey Award, conferred annually during PulpFest, takes its moniker from Frank A. Munsey, publisher of the first pulp magazine. It recognizes “someone who has contributed to the betterment of the pulp community through disseminating knowledge, publishing, or other efforts to preserve and to foster interest pulp magazines.”

There are a dozen people in the running for this year’s Munsey, including two who are (or damn well should be) familiar to crime-fiction readers: Gary Phillips, the author of One-Shot Harry and its 2024 sequel, Ash Dark as Night, as well as “a living, breathing homage to pulp culture and aesthetics,” to quote the PulpFest Web site; and Steve Lewis, founder of the magazine-turned-blog Mystery*File, and “a collector of pulps, digest magazines, paperbacks, and hardcovers for over 60 years.” You can learn more about these stalwarts of pulp fiction, plus their fellow Munsey nominees, here.

This year’s PulpFest will take place in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, from August 1 to 4. The Munsey winner is to be divulged on August 3.

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Finally, I neglected to mention the longlist of rivals for the 2024 Glass Bell Award, a literary accolade sponsored by Goldsboro Books, in London, England. They are:

• In Memoriam, by Alice Winn (Viking)
• None of This Is True, by Lisa Jewell (Century)
• Clytemnestra, by Costanza Casati (Michael Joseph)
• The List, by Yomi Adegoke (Fourth Estate)
• Yellowface, by Rebecca F. Kuang (Borough Press)
• Strange Sally Diamond, by Liz Nugent (Sandycove)
• Chain-Gang All Stars, by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (Harvill Secker)
• Weyward, by Emilia Hart (Borough Press)
• Lady Macbethad, by Isabelle Schuler (Bloomsbury Raven)
• The Silent Man, by David Fennell (Zaffre)
• Godkiller, by Hannah Kaner (HarperVoyager)
• The Square of Sevens, by Laura Shepherd-Robinson (Mantle)
• The Fraud, by Zadie Smith (Hamish Hamilton)
• The Turnglass, by Gareth Rubin (Simon & Schuster)

At least four of those titles—None of This Is True, Strange Sally Diamond, The Silent Man, and The Square of Sevens—fit neatly under the crime/mystery/thriller umbrella. The victor will be made known on September 26, during Goldsboro’s 25 birthday part, and will walk away with £2,000 and “a beautiful, handmade, engraved blue glass bell.”