Following the Scribes and Claymores

These days, there are so many prizes given in the field of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction, that it’s easy to fall behind in reporting them all. So consider this essentially a catch-up post.

Yesterday, the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers announced the winners of its 2026 Scribe Awards for “excellence in the field of writing tie-in fiction for media franchises.” There were seven categories of contenders this year, but the one that seems most pertinent to Rap Sheet readers is General Fiction. Among those nominees, the winner is Raymond Benson’s The Hook and the Eye (Ian Fleming), which employs ex-CIA op Felix Leiter—familiar from several James Bond novels—as the lead in a story that finds him tangling with spies in Manhattan and tasked with safely transporting an “impossibly beautiful and impossibly secretive” woman to Texas.

Also vying for top honors in General Fiction were Murder, She Wrote: Snowy With a Chance of Murder, by Barbara Early (Berkley); Cwej: The Midas Touch, by James Hornby (Independently published); Return of the Maltese Falcon, by Max Allan Collins (Hard Case Crime); Thunder’s Edge: Echoes of Memory, by Sarah Cawkwell (Aconyte); and Murder, She Wrote: The Body in the Trees, by Terrie Farley Moran (Berkley).

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In addition to the Silver Falchion Awards, next month’s Killer Nashville conference will see presented the Claymore Awards, “given to a diverse collection of the top unpublished manuscripts submitted in 2026.” Below are the finalists in just two of 19 divisions.

Best Mystery:
• Exit, Wound, by Mark Dillman
• The Mystery of the Wolf, by David Goodlett
• Answers Will Come, by Henry James Kaye
• All the Buried Secrets, by Kim Nuesse
• The Holiday Slayer, by Janet Shawgo
• The End of Us, by Elissa Thompson

Best Investigator (includes procedural, serious private eye, detective, and noir):
• In Plain Sight, by Jacquelyn Dohoney
• Hunting the Archer, by John Foley
• Victim’s Voice, by Henry James Kaye
• Reflections in the Mist, by Avram Lavinsky
• Centaur Standing, by Clare Monteschio
• Return to Newstead Hills, by CJ Prince

Click here to see the full lineup of 2026 Claymore candidates. The winners of these commendations as well as the Silver Falchions will be revealed in the Tennessee capital on Saturday, August 22.