Short Subjects

• Lambda Literary, a self-described champion of LGBTQ+ books and their authors, has released its list of finalists for the 2025 Lambda Literary Awards, aka the “Lammys.” There are 26 brackets of contenders, but here are the five titles vying for designation this year as Best LGBTQ+ Mystery:

— Charlotte Illes Is Not a Teacher, by Katie Siegel (Kensington)
— One of Us Knows, by Alyssa Cole (Morrow)
— Rough Pages, by Lev AC Rosen (Tor)
— Rough Trade, by Katrina Carrasco (MCD)
— The Night of Baba Yaga, by Akira Otani (Soho Crime)

All of the winners are expected to be honored during a virtual ceremony on Saturday, October 4.

• I attended only a single summer camp during the years of my youth, a week-long Boy Scout outing that I remember mostly for its mosquitoes and invariably malodorous outhouses. (Believe me, I searched for one that didn’t make my eyes water every time I creaked open its door, but without success!) Other children, however, have apparently had more enjoyable or at least more interesting experiences than my own, which is why there are now sufficient summer-camp mysteries to justify Janet Rudolph compiling their titles in this post. I think that of those works, the only one I’ve tackled is Liz Moore’s The God of the Woods. And if that tale had existed for me to read as a tyke, I never would have gone to camp even once!

• Has the quarterly crime-fiction journal Mysterical-E folded? I just noticed that the last issue available online is dated “Summer 2022.”

• Screenwriter Steven Wright (A Thousand Blows, All the Light We Cannot See, Peaky Blinders) has been recruited to script Amazon’s first James Bond film. This announcement, notes The Spy Command, “follows Amazon MGM hiring Denis Villeneuve in June to direct its first Bond entry. In March, Amazon MGM installed David Heyman and Amy Pascal as the new Bond producers. Amazon gained creative control of the Bond movie franchise early this year from Eon Productions.”

• Meanwhile, The Book Bond brings word that Kim Sherwood’s third and last Double O spy thriller, due for publication (at least in Great Britain so far) in May 2026, will be titled Hurricane Room.

• This item comes from In Reference to Murder:

Golden Age authors Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers (the Lord Peter Wimsey series), and G.K. Chesterton (the Father Brown series) are to be brought to life in a TV series titled The Detection Club from the BBC and BritBox International. Produced by BBC Studios Drama Productions, the show is understood to be taking a “mystery-of-the-week”-style approach with fictional versions of Christie, Sayers, and Chesterton set as the main characters solving crimes each episode. Formed nearly 100 years ago, the elusive and exclusive Detection Club met regularly as its members dined and helped each other with technical aspects of their writing. As well as meeting, they also adhered to [clergyman and writer Ronald] Knox’s Commandments, which instructed that a reader of their books must always be given a fair chance at guessing the guilty party. Casting is said to be underway.

While that write-up makes it sound rather like the Detection Club is a historical relic, it is fact still active, with author Martin Edwards serving as its current president.

• The Stiletto Gumshoe’s C.J. Thomas draws my attention to a fine piece, printed earlier this year in a Montana lifestyle magazine, that he says recalls “how these things called ‘noir’ and ‘hard-boiled’ didn’t begin in the back alleys of New York or the mean streets of L.A., but more as ‘rural noir’ with Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest back in 1929.” You can enjoy that full essay here.

• Did you know Netflix has adapted S.A. Cosby’s 2023 novel, All the Sinners Bleed, as a nine-episode TV series? The show is to begin filming this coming November, with the finished product to debut in 2027.

• And here’s a trailer for Lynley, the new BBC/BritBox adaptation of Elizabeth George’s best-selling Inspector Lynley crime series. Starring Leo Suter and Sofia Barclay, the show is an updated version of the 2001-2008 BBC One drama The Inspector Lynley Mysteries, which featured Nathaniel Parker and Sharon Small. Lynley will premiere on BritBox come Thursday, September 4.

Cosby Now Owns Double Raptors

Japanese crime-fiction critic and writer Jiro Kimura reports in The Gumshoe Site that S.A. Cosby has won the Maltese Falcon Society of Japan’s 2024 Maltese Falcon Award for All the Sinners Bleed (Flatiron, 2023). This is the Virginia novelist’s second Falcon victory; his 2021 work, Razorblade Tears, picked up the Falcon last year.

The Falcon prize is “a wood-crafted Falcon statuette,” a copy of which is given annually to “the best hard-boiled/private eye novel published in Japan in the previous year.” Previous recipients include S.J. Rozan, Walter Mosley, Don Winslow, Dennis Lehane, and Michael Connelly.

What the Strand Says

The Strand Magazine has announced the nominees for its 2024 Critics Awards. The Best Novel category is short of surprises; however, the Best Debut list includes a few works of rather less familiarity.

Best Mystery Novel:
• All the Sinners Bleed, by S.A. Cosby (Flatiron)
• Everybody Knows, by Jordan Harper (Mulholland)
• Small Mercies, by Dennis Lehane (Harper)
• Resurrection Walk, by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown)
• Prom Mom, by Laura Lippman (Morrow)
• Time’s Undoing, by Cheryl A. Head (Dutton)
• The Secret Hours, by Mick Herron (Soho Crime)

Best Debut Mystery:
• Fadeaway Joe, by Hugh Lessig (Crooked Lane)
• Mother-Daughter Murder Night, by Nina Simon (Morrow)
• The House in the Pines, by Ana Reyes (Dutton)
• Don’t Forget the Girl, by Rebecca McKanna (Sourcebooks Landmark)
• Adrift, by Lisa Brideau (Sourcebooks Landmark)
• The Peacock and the Sparrow, by I.S. Berry (Atria)

As was true last year, The Strand will give out two Lifetime Achievement Awards for 2024—to both Kathy Reichs and Max Allan Collins. Jonathan Karp of Simon and Schuster has been chosen to receive the magazine’s Publisher of the Year Award.

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And I missed mentioning that S.A. Cosby’s Razorblade Tears (published originally in 2021) has been named by the Maltese Falcon Society of Japan as the winner of its 2024 Maltese Falcon Award. The Falcon prize (“a wood-crafted Falcon statuette”) is given to “the best hard-boiled/private eye novel published in Japan in the previous year.”

(Hat tip to The Gumshoe Site.)

This Year’s Critical Hits

By Fraser Massey
When presenting the list of their favorite 2021 crime, mystery, and thriller works a few weeks back, Washington Post critics Maureen Corrigan and Richard Lipez remarked on the range of settings and themes to be found amid their choices, and they pronounced that level of diversity to be fitting “for a year of so much uncertainty and a far higher than normal rate of social chaos.”

Contentiously, they went on to argue that the high quality of the cream of the novels published over these last dozen months demonstrated “a level of talent and craftsmanship that can compete with any Golden Age of crime fiction.”

Maybe we have entered a new Golden Age. After spending the past few weeks consulting the multiple 2021 “bests” lists submitted by critics covering this field across the globe (those sources are spelled out at the end of this post), I must agree with Corrigan and Lipez about the excellence and variety of titles put forward.

In our now annual quest to determine which novels from this genre were most often recommended (see 2020’s story here), we found that some of the titles being regularly acclaimed this year were by writers previously unknown to us, such as James Kestrel and Abigail Dean. However, there were also many familiar and much-loved wordsmiths once more presenting high-quality fiction.

Topping the chart for the second year in a row—and again by a considerable distance ahead of all other contenders—is S.A. Cosby, who himself was a relative unknown when his slice of southern U.S. noir, Blacktop Wasteland, turned him into the darling of the critics last year.

The latest by “Shawn” Cosby, who, when he’s not writing drives a hearse for his wife’s funeral home in Virginia, is Razorblade Tears. It’s a multi-layered buddy-buddy tale of two ex-cons—one black, one white—who are thrown together on a dangerous quest. Appropriately for these post-woke days, there’s a 21st-century twist to what links those protagonists, Ike Randolph and Buddy Lee Jenkins. Their sons made up a gay, married couple who were killed in what appears to have been a hate crime. Randolph and Jenkins find they must band together in their bid to exact vengeance, and also to confront their own prejudices along the way.

That book’s place at the top of our 2021 list of the 10 most critically acclaimed crime novels seems particularly timely.

1. Razorblade Tears, by S.A. Cosby (Flatiron [U.S.], Headline [UK]) “has unexpected depth for such a violent, confrontational book,” wrote Lesa Holstine in her Library Journal review.
2. Five Decembers, by James Kestrel (Hard Case Crime [U.S., UK]). The Rap Sheet’s own Jim Napier was among the numerous fans of Hawaii-based attorney Kestrel’s debut mystery yarn. His review described it as “a sweeping saga of love, hate, innocence, and evil, consummately told.”
3. Billy Summers, by Stephen King (Scribner [U.S.], Hodder & Stoughton [UK]). Geoffrey Wansell, in Britain’s Daily Mail, hailed veteran novelist King’s tale of a hit man’s last job as “a thriller that tugs at the heart-strings.”
4. Harlem Shuffle, by Colson Whitehead (Doubleday [U.S.], Fleet [UK]).
5. The Dark Hours, by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown [U.S.], Orion [UK]).
6. Slough House, by Mick Herron (Soho Crime [U.S.], John Murray [UK]).
7. Silverview, by John le Carré (Viking [U.S., UK]).
8. Girl A, by Abigail Dean (Viking [U.S.], HarperCollins [UK]).
9 (tie). Clark and Division, by Naomi Hirahara (Soho Crime [U.S.]).
9 (tie). Velvet Was the Night, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Del Rey [U.S.], Jo Fletcher [UK]).

As is so often the case—even today, when women are gaining overdue recognition for their contributions to our favorite genre—this assessment is dominated by male writers.

Our inventory also poignantly features the final, short novel by that master of the espionage thriller, John le Carré, who died in December 2020. His Silverview was published posthumously, after being discovered among the great man’s papers by le Carré’s son Nick Cornwell (aka Nick Harkaway), who readied it for publication.

We thank Cornwall and all of the other writers featured on the list above for providing us with so much wonderful material to read during these difficult times.

CrimeReads senior editor Molly Odintz recently waxed poetic, while introducing one that site’s manifold “best of the year” lists, writing: “As we’ve sleepwalked through the second year of the pandemic, lucid dreaming our way through endless possibilities in the midst of endless isolation, these authors have sought to capture the highs and lows, perils and opportunities, of a changing world.”

Long may they continue to do so.

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Our top-10 register for 2021 was compiled from choices made by our own Rap Sheet contributors, as well as those from crime fiction, mystery, and thriller critics published by the following print publications and digital sites (all are U.S.-based unless otherwise stated): CrimeReads, Daily Express (UK), Daily Mail (UK), The Daily Telegraph (UK), Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine, Esquire, Financial Times (UK), The Globe and Mail (Canada), Good Housekeeping, The Guardian (UK), The Irish Times (Ireland), Library Journal, Literary Review (UK), Marie Claire, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, The New York Times, New Zealand Listener, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, The Spectator (UK), The Sunday Times (UK), Time, The Times (UK), The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.

Special thanks are owed to editor George Easter of Deadly Pleasures. Without his tireless efforts to list so many writers’ “best of” recommendations on his splendid Web site, the task of creating this year’s Rap Sheet tally would have proved impossible.

Our top-10 chart ranks the most frequently chosen books in order of the number of times they appeared on critics’ lists. In the event of a tie for places on the chart, the novels that appeared highest in any lists where rankings were published were given precedence (whenever possible). Titles selected, which were released in either the U.S. or UK prior to the start of 2021, were omitted from the calculations.

READ MORE: “Favorite Books of 2021,” by Lesa Holstine (Lesa’s Book Critiques); “My Books of 2021,” by Kate (The Quick and the Read); “Brad’s Best Reads of 2021,” by Brad Friedman (Ah Sweet Mystery Blog); “Top Five Books of 2021,” by both CrimeFictionLover and Erin Britton (Crime Fiction Lover); “The Very Best Reads of the Second Plague Year,” by Brian Busby (The Dusty Bookcase).

Cosby Victorious in Times Contest

S.A. Cosby’s already much-applauded novel Blacktop Wasteland (Flatiron) has now won the 2020 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the Mystery/Thriller category. That announcement was made on Friday, the day before the 26th Los Angeles Times Festival of Books kicked off its second virtual event held during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Competing against Cosby’s tale in that same bracket were A Beautiful Crime, by Christopher Bollen (Harper); And Now She’s Gone, by Rachel Howzell Hall (Forge); Little Secrets, by Jennifer Hillier (Minotaur); and These Women, by Ivy Pochoda (Ecco).

Mystery/Thriller was just one of 12 Times Book Prize classifications. Click here to see the full list of this year’s recipients.