You're Steele the One for Us

This tidbit comes from In Reference to Murder:

Pierce Brosnan is returning to television for the first time since the 1982 private-eye show Remington Steele as the lead of AMC’s upcoming drama series The Son. The former James Bond is replacing Sam Neill who had been originally cast in the role but left for personal reasons. Based on the book by Philipp Meyer and written by Meyer, Lee Shipman and Brian McGreevy, The Son is a multi-generational epic tale of the story of America’s birth as a superpower through the bloody rise and fall of one Texas family.

And Now for the Macavitys

Today we have the announcement of books and authors nominated for the 2016 Macavity Awards. As Janet Rudolph explains in her blog, “The Macavity Awards are nominated by members of Mystery Readers International, subscribers to Mystery Readers Journal and friends of MRI.” The winners are to be announced during the opening ceremonies at Bouchercon 2016 in New Orleans, Louisiana (September 15-18).

Best Mystery:
• Little Black Lies, by Sharon Bolton (Minotaur)
• The Long and Faraway Gone, by Lou Berney  (Morrow)
• The Hot Countries, by Tim Hallinan (Soho Crime)
• The Child Garden, by Catriona McPherson (Midnight Ink)
• Life or Death, by Michael Robotham (Mulholland)
• The Cartel, by Don Winslow (Knopf)

Best First Mystery:
• Concrete Angel, by Patricia Abbott (Polis)
• Past Crimes, by Glen Erik Hamilton (Morrow)
• The Killing Kind, by Chris Holm (Mulholland)
• Where All Light Tends to Go, by David Joy (Putnam)
• The Unquiet Dead,  by Ausma Zehanat Khan (Minotaur)
• On the Road with Del & Louise, by Art Taylor (Henery Press)

Best Critical/Biographical:
• The Golden Age of Murder: The Mystery of the Writers Who Invented the Modern Detective Story, by Martin Edwards (HarperCollins)
• A Is for Arsenic: The Poisons of Agatha Christie, by Kathryn Harkup (Bloomsbury Sigma)
• Meanwhile, There Are Letters: The Correspondence of Eudora Welty and Ross Macdonald, edited by Suzanne Marrs and Tom Nolan (Arcade)
• Forensics: What Bugs, Burns, Prints, DNA, and More Tell Us About Crime, by Val McDermid (Grove)
• The Lost Detective: Becoming Dashiell Hammett, by Nathan Ward (Bloomsbury)

Best Short Story:
• “The Little Men,” by Megan Abbott (Mysterious Press/Open Road)
• “On Borrowed Time,” by Mat Coward (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, June 2015)
• “Sob Sister,” by Loren D. Estleman (from Detroit Is Our Beat: Tales of the Four Horsemen, by Loren D. Estleman; Tyrus)
• “A Year Without Santa Claus,” by Barb Goffman (Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine [AHMM], January/February 2015)
• “Quack and Dwight,” by Travis Richardson (from Jewish Noir, edited by Kenneth Wishnia; PM Press)
• “A Joy Forever,” by B.K. Stevens (AHMM, March 2015)

Sue Feder Historical Mystery Award:
• The Masque of a Murderer, by Susanna Calkins (Minotaur)
• A Gilded Grave, by Shelley Freydont (Berkley Prime Crime)
• Tom & Lucky (and George & Cokey Flo), by C. Joseph Greaves (Bloomsbury)
• The Lady from Zagreb, by Philip Kerr (Putnam)
• Secret Life of Anna Blanc, by Jennifer Kincheloe (Seventh Street)
• Dreaming Spies, by Laurie R. King (Bantam)

Congratulations to all of the nominees!

“He Was Funny, He Was Beautiful, He Was the Most Perfect Athlete You Ever Saw, and Those Were His Own Words”

This video clip of comedian Billy Crystal paying homage to the late boxing champ Muhammad Ali has nothing to do with crime fiction. But watching it is a wonderful way to begin a Saturday.

Public Acclaim for Private Dicks

The Private Eye Writers of America has announced its nominees for the 2016 Shamus Awards in five categories, as follows.

Best Hardcover Private Eye Novel:
• The Promise, by Robert Crais (Putnam)
• Dance of the Bones, by J.A. Jance (Morrow)
• Gumshoe, by Robert Leininger (Oceanview)
• Brush Back, by Sara Paretsky (Putnam)
• Brutality, by Ingrid Thoft (Putnam)

Best First Private Eye Novel:
• The Red Storm, by Grant Bywaters (Minotaur)
• Night Tremors, by Matt Coyle (Oceanview)
• Trouble in Rooster Paradise, by T.W. Emory (Coffeetown Press)
• Depth, by Lev Ac Rosen (Regan Arts)
• The Do-Right, by Lisa Sandlin (Cinco Puntos Press)

Best Original Private Eye Paperback: 
• Circling the Runway, by J.L. Abramo (Down & Out)
• The Long Cold, by O'Neil De Noux (Big Kiss)
• Split to Splinters, by Max Everhart (Camel Press)
• The Man in the Window, by Dana King (CreateSpace)
• Red Desert, by Clive Rosengren (Moonshine Cove)

Best Private Eye Short Story:
• “The Runaway Girl from Portland, Oregon,” by C.B. Forrest (Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine [AHMM], October 2015)
• “The Sleep of Death,” by David Edgerley Gates (AHMM, December 2015)
• “The Dead Client,” by Parnell Hall (from Dark City Lights: New York Stories, edited by Lawrence Block; Three Rooms Press)
• “The Dead Detective,” by Robert S. Levinson (from Coast to Coast: Murder from Sea to Shining Sea, edited by Andrew McAleer and Paul D. Marks; Down & Out)
• “The Continental Opposite,” by Evan Lewis (AHMM, May 2015)

Last year, independently published books competed with each other in their own category. But this time around, they had to be submitted in the Best Original P.I. Paperback category.

Winners will be declared during a PWA banquet held in association with Bouchercon 2016 in New Orleans, Louisiana (September 15-18).

(Hat tip to Mystery Fanfare.)

Copycat Covers: Lighting the Way

A new entry in our series about remarkably look-alike book fronts.



The Missing Piece, by Kevin Egan (Forge, 2015); Murder Boy, by Bryon Quertermous (Polis, 2015). The photograph comes from the stock art agency Shutterstock.

Oh, no! Just when I thought I’d seen the last of this image of a woman in a scarf (at least I think it’s a woman—either that, or an alien descended to Earth), here it crops up once more on Scottish author Ed James’ new police-procedural e-book, Missing.

Nine Get the Nod

In times past, I have known in advance when to expect news regarding New Zealand’s annual Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel. But since I am not participating as a judge of that competition this year, I was caught off-guard by this afternoon’s announcement of the nine-book longlist of rivals for the 2016 prize. They are:

• Inside the Black Horse, by Ray Berard (Mary Egan)
• Made to Kill, by Adam Christopher (Titan)
• Trust No One, by Paul Cleave (Upstart Press)
• Starlight Peninsula, by Charlotte Grimshaw (Vintage)
• Cold Hard Murder, by Trish McCormack (Glacier Press)
• The Legend of Winstone Blackhat, by Tanya Moir (Vintage)
• The Mistake, by Grant Nicol (Number Thirteen Press)
• American Blood, by Ben Sanders (Allen & Unwin)
• Something Is Rotten, by Adam Sarafis (Echo Publishing)

The Ngaio Marsh Awards were established in 2010. Judging convenor/blogger Craig Sisterson observes that in previous years, “our judging panels have had some very close calls when it came to picking the winner, or tough choices for who’d be finalists, but this is the first time we’ve had such a log-jam of good books battling for the longlist. Even with nearly a dozen debutante authors entering our new Best First Novel category instead, and the majority of our past winners and finalists not being in the running this year, the pool has never been broader or deeper.”

A briefer list of finalists for the Best Crime Novel commendation will be broadcast in late July. And the winner of this prize, as well as the Best First Novel award, will be made known on August 27 during the 2016 WORD Christchurch Writers and Readers Festival.

Field of Honors

Once upon a time only a meager handful of annual awards were available to authors of crime, mystery, and thriller fiction. But as you know if you’ve been reading The Rap Sheet during the last several months, there are now myriad (perhaps too many?) such accolades up for grabs. This week brings a couple more.

First in line: the Pinckley Prizes for Crime Fiction, “sponsored by the Women’s National Book Association of New Orleans and honoring Diana Pinckley, longtime crime-fiction columnist for the New Orleans Times-Picayune.” It has been announced that novelist Sara Paretsky, creator of the V.I. Warshawski private-eye series (Brush Back, etc.), will receive this year’s Pinckley Prize for Distinguished Body of Work. Meanwhile, Christine Carbo’s The Wild Inside (Atria), has been chosen to receive the 2016 Pinckley Prize for Debut Novel.

Second, we have the winners of the 2016 Lambda Literary Awards (“Lammys”), which honor lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) books published during 2015. There were more than two dozen categories of nominees, but the pair of greatest interest to this blog’s readers are probably these:

Lesbian Mystery:
(Tie) Ordinary Mayhem, by Victoria Brownworth (Bold Strokes); and Tarnished Gold, by Ann Aptaker (Bold Strokes)

Also nominated: The Grave Soul, by Ellen Hart (Minotaur); Illicit Artifacts, by Stevie Mikayne (Bold Strokes); No Good Reason, by Cari Hunter (Bold Strokes); The Red Files, by Lee Winter (Ylva); Relatively Rainey, by R.E. Bradshaw (R.E. Bradshaw); and The Tattered Heiress, by Debra Hyde (Riverdale Avenue)

Gay Mystery:
Boystown 7: Bloodlines, by Marshall Thornton (Kenmore)

Also nominated: After the Horses, by Jeffrey Round (Dundurn); The Boys from Eighth and Carpenter, by Tom Mendicino (Kensington); Cheap as Beasts, by Jon Wilson (Bold Strokes); Introducing Sunfish & Starfish: Tropical Drag Queen Detectives, by Wallace Godfrey (Strand Hill); Murder and Mayhem, by Rhys Ford (Dreamspinner Press); Orient, by Christopher Bollen (Harper); and The Swede, by Robert Karjel (Harper)

(Hat tip to Crimespree Magazine.)

Bringing the Dead to Life

(Editor’s note: Just a year after the release of her debut novel, Concrete Angel, Michigan author Patricia “Patti” Abbott is back with a brand-new second yarn, Shot in Detroit [Polis]. I included a short write-up about that work in my latest Kirkus Reviews column, but I also asked Patti to pen a short original piece for The Rap Sheet about the work she did concocting back-stories for each of a dozen dead African-American men—all under 40 years old—who become photo subjects in Shot in Detroit. Her fine submission is below.)

In Shot in Detroit, Violet Hart, trying to succeed as a serious artist, comes up with the idea of photographing the young men her boyfriend, a mortician, buries with alarming regularity. Initially, she's caught up in the artistic aspect of this project. But gradually the horror of what she sees, the possibility that she is exploiting the situation in Detroit, Michigan, takes hold. Black Lives Matter, or the foreshadowing impetus and circumstances around that movement, begins to have an impact on her work. Is she exposing her own insensitive ambition in her pictures, or is she exposing what's happening in the city where she lives? Has she crossed a line?

I suffered those same qualms about the book’s subject matter as I wrote her story, and as it became a several-years-long project. Violet and I, in essence, followed the same path. Yes, it seemed like an interesting idea and one that was once used by a New York photographer with access to a mortician’s Harlem practice. That New Yorker’s gallery show and the subsequent book was a great success a decade ago. By changing the setting to Detroit, by making Violet’s relationship with the mortician more personal, by making her photos focus solely on young black men, by having Violet involved in some of their lives, I upped the ante for accusations of exploitation.

An early reader made a suggestion: Why not include a short chapter about each of the dead men on whom Violet turns her camera lens? Inoculate myself from seeming callous by giving those subjects more airtime in the minutes before their death. Initially this seemed like a good idea. In Shot in Detroit, the 12 men meet their ends due to various causes: smoke inhalation, HIV, West Nile virus, a skirmish at a mall, an altercation at a bar, an aneurysm, and several are victims of robberies. Why not write short pieces that bring each man to life? I began to work on that. And it was very useful. I felt I understood, in a small way, the situation leading up to each man’s demise. But when I began to insert these pieces into the book, they diluted Violet’s story. They broke into any suspense I’d been able to generate from the narrative of how Violet becomes increasingly involved with the police, with gangs, with some dangerous situations. I read a few of these pieces to members of my writing group, and although they liked the stories, they agreed that they were more an intrusion than an enhancement to Violet’s yarn.

I eventually settled on using only a death notice at the front of each chapter in which I dealt with one of those dozen men. In a few cases, there is more than the notice, but only when I thought it served Violet’s story. However, I still wanted to get those back-stories out there. So I began posting them in my blog, Pattinase, for anyone wanting to know more about each individual. (You should be able to keep track of the posts by clicking here.) Some of these deaths closely resemble ones that took place in Detroit between 2006 and 2008. Others I completely invented. Sadly, it was not due to a scarcity of actual deaths (you can Google “shot in Detroit” any day of the week to find some tragic tale similar to those found in my new novel), but strictly to avoid repetition of the same distressing stories. Men die in Detroit because of guns most often. Guns in the home, guns in the car, guns in the schools, guns stuffed deep into pockets. I could have easily had Violet Hart photograph 12 men who perished because of the ease with which Americans can now acquire such deadly weapons. And perhaps that would have been the most honest approach. Over and over and over again.

READ MORE: “My Five (Actually Six) Favorite Novels Set in Detroit (or Near Detroit),” by Patti Abbott (Crimespree Magazine).

Dark Reads Under Sunny Skies

And we’re back! After a week’s impromptu vacation—necessitated by other work demands—I have returned with a new Kirkus Reviews column. My subject this time is summer crime novels, 20 of them to be exact. Among the books I suggest your checking out over the next three warm months are tales by Walter Mosley, both Megan Abbott and Patricia Abbott, Michael Harvey, James Sallis, Peter Lovesey, and Laura McHugh. Click here to learn more about these picks.

READ MORE: “What Kirkus Didn’t Tell You: Three More New Crime Novels You Can Read This Summer,” by Peter Rozovsky
(Detectives Beyond Borders).

Peculier Choices, Indeed

Less than two months after an 18-book longlist was broadcast, organizers of the annual Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival (to be held this year in Harrogate, England, July 21-24) have announced the shortlist of nominees for the 2016 Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year award. They are:

• Time of Death, by Mark Billingham (Sphere)
• Career of Evil, by Robert Galbraith (Sphere)
• Tell No Tales, by Eva Dolan (Harvill Secker)
• Disclaimer, by Renée Knight (Black Swan)
• I Let You Go, by Clare Mackintosh (Sphere)
• Rain Dogs, by Adrian McKinty (Serpent’s Tail)

The winner will be declared during a special ceremony at the festival on its opening night, July 21. That same event will feature the presentation, to Scottish author Val McDermid, of the Outstanding Contribution to Crime Fiction Award. She will join past winners of that commendation: Sara Paretsky, Lynda La Plante, Ruth Rendell, P.D. James, Colin Dexter, and Reginald Hill.

Writing Pair Captures the Bonny Bony

Following closely on the heels of Thursday’s announcement about which books and authors won this year’s Arthur Ellis Awards, comes news involving yet another Canadian crime-fiction prize. As the blog Mystery Fanfare reports today, The Marsh Madness, by Victoria Abbott (Berkley Prime Crime), has captured the 2016 Bloody Words Light Mystery Award (aka the Bony Blithe Award), “an annual Canadian award that celebrates traditional, feel-good mysteries.”

Explains Fanfare’s Janet Rudolph: “Victoria Abbott is the nom de plume for the mother-daughter writing team of Mary Jane Maffini and Victoria Maffini. Both mother and daughter live in Ottawa, Ontario.” The declaration of their victory came last night during an event held at the High Park Club in Toronto.

Also nominated for the 2016 Bony Blithe were: Untimely Death, by Elizabeth J. Duncan (Crooked Lane); Booked for Trouble, by Eva Gates (NAL); White Colander Crime, by Victoria Hamilton (Berkley Prime Crime); and Encore, by Alexis Koetting (Five Star).

Congratulations to the winners and nominees alike!

Canadian Prizes Snag the Limelight

The winners of the 2016 Arthur Ellis Awards were announced earlier this evening during a Crime Writers of Canada (CWC) event at the Arts and Letters Club in Toronto, Ontario.

Best Novel:
Open Season, by Peter Kirby (Linda Leith)

Also nominated: Hungry Ghosts, by Peggy Blair (Simon & Schuster); The Storm Murders, by John Farrow (Minotaur); A Killing in Zion, by Andrew Hunt (Minotaur); and The Night Bell, by Inger Ash Wolfe (McClelland & Stewart)

Best First Novel:
The Unquiet Dead, by Ausma Zehanat Khan (Minotaur)

Also nominated: Hard Drive, by J. Mark Collins (iUniverse); What Kills Good Men, by David Hood (Vagrant Press); Encore, by Alexis Koetting (Five Star); and Old Bones, by Brian R. Lindsay (Volumes)

Lou Allin Memorial Award for Best Novella:
Black Canyon, by Jeremy Bates (Dark Hearts)

Also nominated: Deadly Season, by Alison Bruce (Imajin); Glow Glass, by M.H. Callway (Carrick); The Night Thief, by Barbara Fradkin (Orca); and Beethoven’s Tenth, by Brian Harvey (Orca)

Best Short Story:
“The Avocado Kid,” by Scott Mackay (Ellery Queen Mystery
Magazine [EQMM], June 2015)

Also nominated: “With One Shoe,” by Karen Abrahamson (from The Playground of Lost Toys, edited by Colleen Anderson and Ursula Pflug; Exile Press); “The Siege,” by Hilary Davidson (EQMM, December 2015); “The Water Was Rising,” by Sharon Hunt (EQMM, August 2015); and “Movable Type,” by S.G. Wong (from AB Negative: An Alberta Crime Anthology, edited by Axel Howerton; Coffin Hop Press)

Best Book in French:
L’Affaire Myosotis, by Luc Chartrand (Québec Amérique)

Also nominated: L’affaire Céline, by Jean-Louis Fleury (Éditions Alire); La bataille de Pavie, by André Jacques (Druide); Le mauvais côté des choses, by Jean Lemieux (Québec Amérique); and L’affaire Mélodie Cormier, by Guillaume Morrissette (Guy Saint-Jean éditeur)

Best Juvenile/YA Book:
Trouble Is a Friend of Mine, by Stephanie Tromly (Kathy Dawson)

Also nominated: Diego’s Crossing, by Robert Hough (Annick Press); Set You Free, by Jeff Ross (Orca); The Blackthorn Key, by Kevin Sands (Aladdin); and The Dogs, by Allan Stratton (Scholastic)

Best Non-fiction Book:
Empire of Deception: The Incredible Story of a Master Swindler Who Seduced a City and Captivated the Nation, by Dean Jobb (HarperCollins)

Also nominated: Human on the Inside: Unlocking the Truth about Canada’s Prisons, by Gary Garrison (University of Regina Press); The Bastard of Fort Stikine: The Hudson’s Bay Company and the Murder of John McLoughlin Jr., by Debra Komar (Goose Lane); Cold War, by Jerry Langton (HarperCollins); and Mr. Big: The Investigation into the Deaths of Karen and Krista Hart, by Colleen Lewis and Jennifer Hicks
(Flanker Press)

The Dundurn Unhanged Arthur for Best Unpublished First Crime Novel: When the Flood Falls, by Jayne Barnard

Also nominated: Knight Blind, by Alice Bienia; Brave Girls, by Pam Isfeld; Better the Devil You Know, by J.T. Siemens; and Give Out Creek, by J.G. Toews

In addition, the CWC named the late Eric Wright, author of the Charlie Salter mysteries, as its 2016 Grand Master.

Congratulations to all of the victors and their rivals!

(Hat tip to Mystery Fanfare.)

Copycat Covers: Identity Crises

A new entry in our series about remarkably look-alike book fronts.



The Revenant, by Sonia Gensler (Ember, 2013); and The Real Mary Kelly: Jack the Ripper’s Fifth Victim and the Identity of the Man that Killed Her, by Wynne Weston-Davies (Blink, 2016).

Don’t Forget Guttridge’s Prize

In my coverage late last week of England’s CrimeFest 2016, I neglected to mention that novelist-critic Peter Guttridge won this year’s Margery Allingham Short Story Competition for his unpublished tale, “The Box-Shaped Mystery.” Also shortlisted for the Allingham prize were: “The Blockage,” by Ian Cowmeadow; “Faceless Killer,” by Christine Poulson; and “Safe as Houses,” by Scott Hunter.

The announcement of Guttridge’s success was made on Friday, May 20, during an event at CrimeFest in Bristol.

According to a news release, this competition—named in honor of the author who created sleuth Albert Campion and established in 2013—seeks to choose a yarn that “fits into Margery’s definition of what makes a great story: ‘The Mystery remains box-shaped, at once a prison and a refuge. Its four walls are, roughly, a Crime, a Mystery, an Enquiry and a Conclusion with an Element of Satisfaction in it.’” Past winners were Lesley Mace and Martin Edwards.

Judgment Calls

The Strand Magazine has released its lineup of nominees for the 2015 Strand Magazine Critics Awards. They are as follows:

Best Novel:
• Career of Evil, by Robert Galbraith (Mulholland)
• A Banquet of Consequences, by Elizabeth George (Viking)
• The Lady from Zagreb, by Phillip Kerr (Putnam)
• Forty Thieves, by Thomas Perry (Mysterious Press)
• The Whites, by Richard Price writing as Harry Brandt (Picador)
• The Cartel, by Don Winslow (Knopf)

Best First Novel:
• The Truth and Other Lies, by
Sascha Arango (Atria)
• Normal, by Graeme Cameron (Mira)
• The Marauders, by Tom Cooper (Crown)
• Past Crimes, by Glen Erik Hamilton (HarperCollins)
• The Girl on the Train, by Paula Hawkins (Riverhead)
• Disclaimer, by Renée Knight (Harper)

The winners of these commendations are to be announced during an invitation-only cocktail party in New York City on July 5.

In addition, Strand managing editor Andrew F. Gulli writes in The Guardian that Colin Dexter, the creator of Inspector Endeavour Morse, and Jeffery Deaver, the inventor of New York City forensic criminalist Lincoln Rhyme, have been chosen to receive this year’s Strand Critics lifetime achievement awards. “To me,” Gulli notes, “lifetime achievement awards serve as a reminder that we are privileged to live in an age where we can look at the shelves in bookstores and newsstands and see works by two authors destined to endure for generations as classics of a wonderful genre.”

(Hat tip to The Gumshoe Site.)

It’s Enough to Make Me Blush

My note this last Sunday about The Rap Sheet’s 10th anniversary spurred a remarkable bounty of generous and enthusiastic remarks. But nobody wrote quite as much about that milestone as Terence Towles Canote, who penned a whole post about it for his own excellent blog, A Shroud of Thoughts. It reads, in part:

For those of you unfamiliar with The Rap Sheet, it is a blog dedicated to crime fiction (the blog dedicated to crime fiction, in my opinion). What is more, The Rap Sheet doesn’t simply cover the printed word, but also television shows, films, and radio shows as well. Over the years The Rap Sheet has featured articles on The NBC Mystery Movie, the classic radio show Suspense, and the films based on Dashiell Hammett’s classic The Maltese Falcon. The Rap Sheet benefits from having multiple contributors, many of who are “top professionals” (to borrow a phrase from the American introduction to The Avengers). They don’t simply write about crime fiction, they have actually written crime fiction. Quite simply, among The Rap Sheet’s contributors are actual crime novelists. ...

For years now The Rap Sheet has been an invaluable resource for fans of crime fiction. It has always been both very informative and enjoyable to read. Here is to another ten years!

Thank you, Terence—and thank you, everyone!—for your support.

Slay Rides

Spurred on by the recent release of a trailer for Time After Time, a forthcoming ABC-TV crime drama that imagines Jack the Ripper fleeing Victorian London for 21st-century New York City, I wrote this week’s Kirkus Reviews column about two new Ripper-related novels, Alex Grecian’s Lost and Gone Forever and Oscar de Muriel’s The Strings of Murder. Click here to find the full piece.

READ MORE: “Signs That You Should Probably Reconsider Writing that Jack the Ripper Novel,” by Miriam Elizabeth Burstein (The Little Professor).

The Rap Sheet: 10 Years in the Making

I’ve wanted to be a book critic for a very long while. The first review I ever wrote was for The Oregonian, the daily newspaper in my hometown of Portland, Oregon. My eighth-grade teacher, Jeanne Leeson, had a program in place that allowed her more promising students to publish reviews in that broadsheet, and she asked me to critique a new book about U.S. Senator Mike Mansfield (D-Montana) and his efforts to limit the deployment of anti-ballistic missile (ABM) systems in the United States and the Soviet Union. (A rather complicated topic, though I don’t remember feeling out of my depth.) From there, it was some years before I took on another reviewing assignment, this time for my college paper. Protests had erupted on campus after the administration foolishly invited a South African government official to address the student body (this was during South Africa’s racial-segregation era, after all), and one of my contributions to the coverage looked at James McClure’s crime novels starring white Afrikaan Lieutenant Tromp Kramer of the Murder and Robbery Squad and his Zulu assistant, Sergeant Mickey Zondi.

After college, during my stint with Portland’s “alternative weekly,” Willamette Week, I composed a great number of crime- and mystery-fiction reviews for the paper’s entertainment section, Fresh Weekly, and took advantage of what I now see were incredibly lucky opportunities to interview authors in this genre. (It was during that period, for instance, that I traveled—on my own dime—to interview Ross Macdonald in Santa Barbara, California, Arthur Lyons in Palm Springs, and Bill Pronzini in Petaluma; plus Robert B. Parker in Boston and George C. Chesbro in New York.) Although I was interested as well, back then, in science fiction (particularly work by Larry Niven, who I also went to chat with in Tarzana, California), my passion for stories marked by a crime or mystery bent soon dominated my pleasure-reading hours. It was just the beginning of a long education in the field that has carried me through the rest of my life so far.

When Linda L. Richards invited me, in 1997, to begin contributing to her online review/author interview site, January Magazine, I was thrilled. It gave me a soapbox from which to comment regularly on crime fiction (though my first review for January was actually of Larry McMurtry’s Comanche Moon). Within a couple of years my contributions to the publication increased, when I launched what was originally an e-mail newsletter about the genre called The Rap Sheet. I took responsibility, too, for building up January’s crime-fiction department, which in 2005 won the Gumshoe Award, presented by David J. Montgomery’s then-substantial Mystery Ink Web site.

Around the same time I received that commendation, I concluded that The Rap Sheet needed to be something more than a newsletter, and that I needed to have more design control over the product if it was ever to fulfill what I imagined was its potential. Coincidentally, in 2005, my technophobic copy-editor colleague and longtime friend, Charles Smyth, asked me to help him figure out how to use the Blogger software. He wanted to create his own blog (then still a new idea—imagine!), but didn’t know how. In the course of assisting Charlie, I realized that blogging could be the way of the future for The Rap Sheet. It would allow me to update the information

J. Kingston Pierce

I wished to convey in a more timely fashion, and lift the burden of putting The Rap Sheet together off Linda, who was already buried in other work on January, as well as her fiction-writing.

So on May 22, 2006—10 years ago today—after several weeks of experimenting with the Blogger software, trying to adapt elements of the Rap Sheet newsletter design to a blog format, I finally began publishing on this page. The site has grown tremendously since then, recording its 500th post by November 2006, and its 1,000th post by April 2007; registering half a million page views by March 2009, and a cool million two years later; attracting a small but enthusiastic lineup of guest contributors; winning a Spinetingler Award in 2009; and in 2008 being nominated for an Anthony Award for Best Web Site/Blog—the first of two times that commendation was dangled in front of me, the second occasion being in 2011. (Sadly, in neither case did I actually take the Anthony home, and now the Best Web Site/Blog category seems to have been eliminated from the competition.) Oh, and when I checked this morning, Blogger’s statistics-keeping software told me that almost 6,400 posts have gone up in The Rap Sheet, and the site has exceeded 3.8 million page views. Not bad for a little “Weblog” that rose out of my enthusiasm for crime fiction of all sorts and wasn’t intended to be much more than a hobby.

Over the last 10 years, I have sought to make The Rap Sheet something I’d want to read, even if I weren’t responsible for its production. Because I have spent my entire professional career as a writer and editor, somebody more interested in finely crafted and thoughtful prose than in brief and pithy reportage, I have pretty much ignored the advice dispensed by “experts” who claim that people are too busy in the 21st century to read anything online that’s longer than 500 words, or that forces them occasionally to refer to a dictionary. I want to create here a spirited, lasting, non-academic resource for readers interested in gleaning more than a shallow understanding of this genre’s depth and breadth. The fact that many of our articles have won considerable attention suggests we’re on the right track. The following 10 posts have been, by far, the most popular:

1. NBC’s “Mystery Movie” Turns 40: “Banacek” (December 7, 2011)
2. The Return of Lisbeth Salander (January 2, 2009)
3. Distinction by Design: Best Crime Covers, 2015 (January 7, 2016)
4. Say Good-bye to Kolchak’s “Father” (July 27, 2015)
5. But Really, Sally McMillan Is Ageless (August 14, 2006)
6. “Money,” Shot (December 4, 2007)
7. NBC’s “Mystery Movie” Turns 40: “McMillan & Wife”
(November 10, 2011)
8. Happy Birthday, Doctor Watson? (March 31, 2009)
9. The Book You Have to Read: “Tapping the Source,” by Kem Nunn (March 15, 2013)
10. Quinn’s Border Blues (October 15, 2013)

(I won’t clue you in here to what these posts entail, but will instead let you explore and enjoy them for yourself.)

It’s also interesting to see who’s paying attention to this blog. As might be expected, the overwhelming majority of readers hail from the United States, where I also live, with the United Kingdom holding second place. After that, the countries most often clicking over to The Rap Sheet rank in this order: Germany, Canada, France, Russia, Ukraine, The Netherlands, Poland, and Australia.

When I first took up this venture, I was editing and contributing to a wide variety of publications, all of which kept me busy and intellectually stimulated. Nowadays, I spend far too many hours working by myself, and my outlets for journalism and other writing have been severely reduced in number. I’d expected by this stage of my life to have moved confidently from writing non-fiction to penning novels. But my labors in that direction have proven … well, frustrating at best. Alternatively, I imagined The Rap Sheet might become a well-paying enterprise, perhaps an adjunct to some book-publisher’s Web site, but that hasn’t come to pass, either.

Producing The Rap Sheet has gone from being a sideline to being a central occupational endeavor, perhaps a legacy of sorts. And while there are often moments when I feel the blog doesn’t quite measure up to my (admittedly unrealistic) ambitions for it, I have drawn tremendous energy from some of the supportive notes I’ve received during these last 10 years. One reader, for instance, wrote to say, “The Rap Sheet is, in my opinion, by far the best of the best in the mystery-fiction blogging field.” Another remarked: “After reading your latest Rap Sheet, I wanted to convey how much I appreciate all your efforts in producing that blog. Due to circumstances beyond my control, I am stuck in southeast Georgia. The Rap Sheet is a true highlight for me. When I lived in Berkeley and in New York City, I was active as a fan in the crime-fiction scenes there. To say The Rap Sheet ‘keeps me in touch’ only scratches the surface of how it functions for me. Thanks again for your efforts!” No less heartening are compliments I have received on occasion from writers whose work I’ve edited over the years, either at January or The Rap Sheet. Read one: “You have made me a better writer, my friend.” And in a post highlighting blogs that provide “good crime-fiction recommendations,” critic/anthologist Sarah Weinman described The Rap Sheet as “one of the oldest [such sites] ... and still one of the best—plus editor J. Kingston Pierce was the first person to seriously edit my reviews, for which I am forever grateful).”

I can’t tell you what I shall be doing in another 10 years, or whether The Rap Sheet will still be around to celebrate its 20th anniversary. But I can say that this last decade has brought unexpected treats and memorable successes to yours truly. It’s through The Rap Sheet that I won my column-writing gig for Kirkus Reviews, and it is because of this modest blog (and my work with January Magazine) that I established some of my most prized friendships, including those with Ali Karim and Linda Richards. If I had to give it all up tomorrow, I’d be more heartbroken than I might’ve expected back in 2006, but I would also be extremely proud of what has been created here.

Thank you, everyone, for following along on this adventure.

SEE MORE: Killer Covers joins this anniversary celebration with its own “Rap Party” countdown of vintage paperback fronts.

Winners Circle

You may remember that on April 30, I participated in Seattle’s Independent Bookstore Day “Champion Challenge,” which required contestants to visit at least 17 of 21 participating bookshops around the city within one day. Everybody who succeeded received a 25-percent discount at all 21 establishments for a year.

Only 42 book lovers took on the “Challenge” in 2015, the first year this race was run. But as I learned last evening, during a crowded celebration at Ada’s Technical Books and Café on Capitol Hill, between 118 and 120 people finished in the money last month—almost three times as many. We’ll have to see whether organizers change the rules for 2017, to cut down on the number of winners. I hope not. I’m already planning to try again next year.

Championed at CrimeFest

Thanks to the indefatigable Ali Karim, we can now bring you the winners of five different awards given out this evening at CrimeFest.

Audible Sounds of Crime Award (for best unabridged crime audiobook): The Girl on the Train, by Paula Hawkins; read by Clare Corbett, India Fisher, and Louise Brealey (Random House Audiobooks)

Also nominated: Sleep Tight, by Rachel Abbott; read by Melody Grove and Andrew Wincott (Whole Story Audiobooks); Make Me, by Lee Child; read by Jeff Harding (Random House Audiobooks); The Stranger, by Harlan Coben; read by Eric Meyers (Orion); Career of Evil, by Robert Galbraith; read by Robert Glenister (Hachette Audio); Finders Keepers, by Stephen King; read by Will Patton (Hodder & Stoughton); The Girl in the Spider’s Web, by David Lagercrantz; read by Saul Reichlin (Quercus); I Let You Go, by Clare Mackintosh; read by David Thorpe and Julia Barrie (Hachette Audio); and Even Dogs in the Wild, by Ian Rankin; read by James Macpherson (Orion)

Kobo eDunnit Award (for the best crime fiction e-book): The Crossing, by Michael Connelly (Orion)

Also nominated: Broken Promise, by Linwood Barclay (Orion); A Bed of Scorpions, by Judith Flanders (Allison & Busby); A Southwold Mystery, by Suzette A. Hill (Allison & Busby); Dreaming Spies, by Laurie R. King (Allison & Busby); Freedom’s Child, by Jax Miller (HarperCollins); Blood, Salt, Water, by Denise Mina (Orion); and The Silent Boy, by Andrew Taylor (HarperCollins)

The Last Laugh Award (for the best humorous crime novel): Bryant & May and the Burning Man, by Christopher Fowler (Transworld)

Also nominated: The Truth and Other Lies, by Sascha Arango (Simon & Schuster); As Chimney Sweepers Come to Dust, by Alan Bradley (Orion); Mrs. Pargeter’s Principle, by Simon Brett (Severn House); Smoke and Mirrors, by Elly Griffiths (Quercus); The Case of the ‘Hail Mary’ Celeste, by Malcolm Pryce (Bloomsbury); Mr. Campion’s Fox, by Mike Ripley (Severn House); and Savage Lane, by Jason Starr
(No Exit Press)

The H.R.F. Keating Award (for the best biographical or critical book related to crime fiction): The Golden Age of Murder: The Mystery of the Writers Who Invented the Modern Detective Story, by Martin Edwards (HarperCollins)

Also nominated: The Sherlock Holmes Book, by David Stuart Davies and Barry Forshaw (Dorling Kindersley); The Man with the Golden Typewriter: Ian Fleming’s James Bond Letters, by Fergus Fleming (Bloomsbury); Crime Uncovered: Detective, by Barry Forshaw (Intellect); Curtains Up: Agatha Christie—A Life in Theatre, by Julius Green (HarperCollins); Criminal Femmes Fatales in American Hard-boiled Crime Fiction, by Maysam Hasam Jaber (Palgrave Macmillan); Crime Uncovered: Anti-hero, by Fiona Peters and
Rebecca Stewart (Intellect); and John le Carré: The Biography, by Adam Sisman (Bloomsbury)

Petrona Award for Best Scandinavian Crime Novel of the Year: The Caveman, by Jørn Lier Horst, translated by Anne Bruce
(Sandstone Press; Norway)

Also nominated: The Drowned Boy, by Karin Fossum, translated by Kari Dickson (Harvill Secker; Norway); The Defenceless, by Kati Hiekkapelto, translated by David Hackston (Orenda; Finland); The Girl in the Spider's Web, by David Lagercrantz, translated by George Goulding (MacLehose Press; Sweden); Satellite People, by Hans Olav Lahlum, translated by Kari Dickson (Mantle; Norway); and Dark As My Heart, by Antti Tuomainen, translated by Lola Rogers
(Harvill Secker; Finland)

Congratulations to all of the winners and nominees!

READ MORE: “Living the Dream,” by Martin Edwards (‘Do You Write Under Your Own Name?’).