Distinguished Dicks

The Private Eye Writers of America has announced its finalists for the 2025 Shamus Awards, in four categories.

Best P.I. Hardcover:
• Kingpin, by Mike Lawson (Atlantic Monthly Press)
• The Hollow Tree, by Phillip Miller (Soho Crime)
• Farewell, Amethystine, by Walter Mosley (Mulholland)
• Trouble in Queenstown, by Delia Pitts (Minotaur)
• Death and Glory, by Will Thomas (Minotaur)

Best Original P.I. Paperback:
• Geisha Confidential, by Mark Coggins (Down & Out)
• Quarry’s Return, by Max Allan Collins (Hard Case Crime)
• Not Born of Woman, by Teel James Glenn (Crossroad Press)
• Bless Our Sleep, by Neil S. Plakcy (Samwise)
• Call of the Void, by J.T. Siemens (NeWest Press)
• The Big Lie, by Gabriel Valjan (Level Best)

Best First P.I. Novel:
• Twice the Trouble, by Ash Clifton (Crooked Lane)
• The Devil’s Daughter, by Gordon Greisman (Blackstone)
• Fog City, by Claire M. Johnson (Level Best)
• The Road to Heaven, by Alexis Stefanovich-Thomson (Dundurn Press)
• Holy City, by Henry Wise (Atlantic Monthly Press)

Best P.I. Short Story:
• “Deadhead,” by Tom Andes (Issue 10.1: A Case of KINK—Cowboy Jamboree Magazine)
• “Alibi in Ice,” by Libby Cudmore (Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, July/August 2024)
• “Drop Dead Gorgeous,” by M.E. Proctor (from Janie’s Got a Gun: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Music of Aerosmith, edited by Michael Bracken; White City Press)
• “Under Hard Rock,” by Ed Teja (Black Cat Weekly #164)
• “The Five Cent Detective,” by S.B. Watson (from Crimeucopia: Great Googly-Moo!; Murderous Ink Press)

All of the winners will be announced on September 4 during Bouchercon 2025’s opening ceremonies, to be held at the National WWII Museum in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Revue of Reviewers: 6-11-25

Critiquing some of the most interesting recent crime, mystery, and thriller releases. Click on the individual covers to read more.

The End Comes for Forsyth

Mystery Fanfare alerts us that Frederick Forsyth, English author of The Day of the Jackal, The Odessa File, and other popular works of espionage fiction, passed away yesterday at age 86. “Forsyth,” that blog explains, “was the master of the geopolitical thriller populated with spies, mercenaries, and political extremists. He wrote 24 books, including 14 novels, and sold more than 75 million copies.”

In his obituary for The Guardian, Mike Ripley recalls:

Frederick Forsyth always claimed that when, in early 1970, as an unemployed foreign correspondent, he sat down at a portable typewriter and “bashed out” The Day of the Jackal, he “never had the slightest intention of becoming a novelist”. ...

Forsyth’s manuscript for The Day of the Jackal was rejected by three publishers and withdrawn from a fourth before being taken up by Hutchinson in a three-book deal in 1971. Even then there were doubts, as half the publisher’s sales force were said to have expressed no confidence in a book that plotted the assassination of the French president General Charles de Gaulle—an event that everyone knew did not happen.

The skill of the book was that its pace and seemingly
forensic detail encouraged readers to suspend disbelief and accept that not only was the plot real, but that the Jackal—an anonymous English assassin—almost pulled it off. In fact, at certain points, the reader’s sympathy lies with the Jackal rather than with his victim.

It was a publishing tour de force, winning the Mystery Writers of America[’s] Edgar award for best first novel [in 1972], attracting a record paperback deal at the Frankfurt book fair and being quickly filmed by the US director Fred Zinnemann, with Edward Fox as the ruthless Jackal. Forsyth was offered a flat fee for the film rights (£20,000) or a fee plus a percentage of the profits—he took the flat fee, later admitting that he was “pathetic at money”.

Ripley remarks that while Forsyth “also became well known as a political and social commentator, often with acerbic views on the European Union, international terrorism, security matters and the status of Britain’s armed forces, ... it is for his thrillers that he will be best remembered.” The author’s final solo work was The Fox (2018), though he and fellow writer Tony Kent penned Revenge of Odessa, a sequel to The Odessa File, which is scheduled for UK publication in October, with an American edition due out in November.

READ MORE: “Frederick Forsyth: An Editor’s Remembrance,” by Neil Nyren (CrimeReads).

Chilling Parallels to McCarthyism

By Peter Handel
Clay Risen is a reporter and editor with The New York Times, covering the obituary beat. He is also an accomplished historian and the author of numerous books, specializing in 20th-century America. Among those works are: The Crowded Hour: Theodore Roosevelt, the Rough Riders, and the Dawn of the American Century (2019), called by Kirkus Reviews “a revelatory history of America’s grasp for power”; The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act (2014), which led The Atlantic to comment, “Risen is right to take a fresh look at the evidence and tell the story from a new perspective, focusing on unsung heroes”; and A Nation on Fire: America in the Wake of the King Assassination (2009), described by Publishers Weekly as “a crucial addition to civil-rights history, sure to absorb anyone interested in the times, the movement or [Martin Luther King] Jr.”

His latest non-fiction book, Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism, and the Making of Modern America, was published by Scribner in March. It received starred reviews from Kirkus and Booklist. As relevant as it is comprehensive, and based in part on newly declassified sources, Red Scare provides valuable perspective and insight into the fraught political atmosphere emanating today from both numerous states and Washington, D.C.

Red Scare makes clear that the tail-end of the post-World War II American mood was, in many aspects, not dissimilar from today’s climate. A fear of “the other” was pervasive, and it gave rise to both paranoia about communists hiding under every bed and a repressive desire to stamp out elements and activities that, according to Republican U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin and his right-wing allies at the John Birch Society, threatened nothing less than the sanctity of American values and morals. Their targets, beyond communists, included films deemed immoral or subversive, gay men and lesbians in government, and the organizing efforts of labor unions.

In its review of Risen’s latest book, The New Yorker noted:

As a scholarly subject, the Red Scare has never quite experienced its moment of glory. During the second half of the twentieth century, the topic was too combustible to make for great history: you were either for or against Joe McCarthy, for or against Alger Hiss, for or against the Rosenbergs. The end of the Cold War produced a rush of work seeking to assess new political, archival, and conceptual openings. For the first time, it became possible for non-Marxist historians to write admiringly about the Communist Party’s civil-rights and antifascist activism without needing to denounce Stalin on every page.

Risen’s exhaustive examination of that heady period makes for compelling reading. He provides context as he sets the stage prior to the rise of the odious McCarthy, and as he proceeds to take his readers on a journey through a landscape of imagined peril and frequently utterly baseless insinuations and lies, we can’t help but get the feeling that we’ve seen this movie before.

Over the course of an interview conducted via e-mail in May, Risen discussed his new book and his approach as a historian to chronicling significant events or moments in our collective past.

Peter Handel: Let’s start with your day-job writing obituaries for The New York Times. Aren’t they also a reflection of history?

Clay Risen: I’ve been writing obituaries for the NY Times for about four years now, and it turns out to be great practice for writing history. Each obituary is itself a work of history, condensed into about 900 words. In that little packet of sentences, you not only have to explain a person’s life, but also the history around them, how they connected to it, and why they mattered. This was particularly useful training for Red Scare; it’s a sprawling story with many characters, all of whom I had to bring to life fully and efficiently.

PH: You’ve written several books looking at American history, including two on aspects of the civil-rights movement. What prompted you, in 2019, to begin tackling another of America’s greatest debacles with Red Scare? Did the first Trump administration play a role in your choice to examine Senator McCarthy and anti-communist fearmongering during the mid-20th century?

(Left) Clay Risen (photo by Kate Milford).

CR: I wasn’t really looking for something timely. When I began working on the book, I was more interested in the way that the Red Scare and its legacy operated in the background of subsequent periods of American history, including the civil-rights era. It seemed like a kind of dark matter that shaped and often distorted events—including, I thought, the current moment. But I had no idea it would be so on the nose.

PH: Can you explain your approach to writing about the kind of significant periods of American history you’ve previously explored—the civil-rights era and the rise of Teddy Roosevelt?

CR: I look for stories with strong narrative threads, but also stories that say something bigger about American history. For example, the Rough Riders make for a great story, but I was more interested in what their celebrity says about the rise of America as a global power in the early 20th century.

PH: You clearly research your subjects deeply. As you are doing that research, do you ever change your perspective on your subjects along the way? In other words, to what extent do you enter a subject with preconceived notions or ideas—if any?

CR: I suppose like anyone, I have my preconceived notions. I’d call them hypotheses. What I expect to find. But that changes, sometimes at the edges, sometimes in substance. It’s something I’ve learned from reporting—you need to have some idea about what you’re looking for, but as you talk to people, you have to be willing to pivot as the truth emerges.

PH: As a historian, is it hard to be “objective?” Is there even such a thing as an objective historian?

CR: Objectivity can mean many things. A lot of people take it to mean a blank slate, someone who simply reports “the facts” as if they were some sort of mirror. But that’s impossible, because reporting is itself an act of interpretation and judgment. All historians bring those tools to the task; that’s what makes their work worth reading. These days there aren’t a whole lot of historians who claim to be “objective,” though—most are clear in the intellectual assumptions they’re bringing along. And I’m fine with that.

PH: In your preface, you note that as a work of history, you are not concerned with drawing parallels between past and present. But isn’t it true that we see many of the same tactics being emulated by the Trump administration that McCarthy and his ilk used? For example: innuendo, taking a kernel of truth and expanding it into a giant, dubious ear of corn, if you will. We see that in the false accusations that have led to Trump’s legal setbacks regarding efforts to deport immigrants. In your book, you talk about the rise of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, and note he was making plans for his own mass deportations.

CR: Absolutely. When I wrote that, I had no idea what would happen—the [2024 presidential] election was still months away. Had [Kamala] Harris won, in my mind we might be focused on a different kind of modern-day McCarthyism, namely the charge that the Left was censoring ideas and people that went against their own orthodoxy. So I wanted to keep the book open to interpretation, in that sense. But I admit that the introduction reads differently in 2025.

(Above) U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy testifying before a Senate subcommittee on elections and rules in an effort to link fellow U.S. Senator William Benton to communism.

PH: The nature of cultural “wars” also seems to be a consistent part of the playbook. Do you see similarities or major differences in how this has played out? The irony of a group of elite, educated white men railing against the very elite they are a part of really cracks me up.

CR: Of course. The current “culture war” against DEI [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion] and “wokeism,” whatever that means, strikes me as the hijacking of a legitimate, specific debate—how much should we adapt our institutions to make up for past injustices?—in order to further a campaign against the post-New Deal liberal order. In that sense, today’s fight is not that different from what we saw during the Red Scare.

PH: Early in the book, you note that the tactics and subjects of fear as they were employed during the late 1940s and ’50s are not all dissimilar from what we’re told to fear nowadays—the rise of women’s rights and expansion of their roles; immigrants, white and from eastern and southern Europe; and a longing for a Victorian morality (we see J.D. Vance in that ballpark). Added to that is pushback against equality for the LGBTQ+ community.

CR: Definitely. I think there is both an echo of the Red Scare today, but also a clear line linking then and now. The same sort of thinking that animated the culture warriors of the 1950s, and in particular the conspiracy theories, are still alive today.

PH: The cultural “enemies” lists of both the McCarthy era and now—comprising unions, Hollywood, schools, book banning, and a general sense of hyped hysteria, fueled by innuendo and flat-out falsehoods—feel like just an updating of the same tactics. Is this a case of “the more things change, the more they stay the same?”

CR: Yes, but with an asterisk. History is helpful in letting us see how things have not changed, but it is also helpful in showing us how they have—in other words, the similarities, but also the differences. Historians do us a disservice when they only focus on the former.

PH: Do you see a direct line from the techniques and right-wing politics of McCarthy to those of Trump? I ask in part because the subtitle of your book concludes with the phrase, “The Making of Modern America.”

CR: I do. Not in every way, but in some important ones. The Red Scare legitimized the smear campaign and the use of innuendo, especially when the accusations came to radicalism. It also set in motion a long-deepening distrust of our public and civic institutions, which we are still experiencing today.

PH: I see in the index no mention of Christianity, except a reference to the Catholic Church. It was a major arbiter of what people should read and see back then. I still remember the Legion of Decency movie codes applied to Hollywood films. Can you talk about the role religion in American life and culture played during the McCarthy years and, more specifically, what role it played in his rise to power and his subsequent hearings? (I’m thinking of the increasingly prominent rise of white supremacy playing out in many Christian institutions and media.)

CR: That’s a good point. I don’t focus on religion, but it suffuses the book. It’s a complicated story. Of course, Catholic conservatives helped drive the motors of the Red Scare—the Knights of Columbus and the Legion of Decency were especially important in the structure of the Hollywood blacklists, for example. But many religious leaders denounced the Red Scare. They were somewhat insulated from attacks, but they were also insulated from the politics of the moment—most religious leaders, like Billy Graham, kept themselves at a distance.

PH: In addition to your history books, you’ve authored several about whiskey, including Bourbon: The Story of Kentucky Whiskey (2021) and The Impossible Collection of Whiskey: The 100 Most Exceptional and Collectible Bottles (2020). What prompted you to also focus on this somewhat niche subject? And does your background in Tennessee have anything to do with your interest in that remarkable spirit?

CR: I grew up in Nashville, so whiskey was pretty common around me. But it wasn’t until the mid-2000s that I started to explore it. By then I was in Washington [D.C.], and there was a bar down the street called, appropriately, Bourbon. Washington was, and is, a great whiskey town, and so I could sample things at the bar, then usually find a bottle of what I liked at a local store. And when I would go home to Nashville to visit, my brother and I would take a day-trip up into Kentucky to check out distilleries. My interest became a job of sorts when I realized I could write about whiskey, and that editors were willing to pay me for it.

PH: Finally, what’s next for you as a historian?

CR: I’m on contract to write a book about two whiskey barons in the late 19th century, whose opposing empires helped drive forward the industry and, through their extensive political connections, a surprising range of Progressive-era changes. It’s still early in the process, so I can’t say much more, except that it finally brings together my two writing interests, whiskey and history, and hopefully in a way that readers will find fascinating. I sure do.

READ MORE: “It’s All Happened Here,” by Robert Siegel (Moment).

Readers Speak Out

I’m reporting this a bit tardily, but it took purchasing the May/June 2025 edition of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine for me to learn which authors and stories won this year’s Readers Awards. Here are the top three stories from 2024 that resonated with EQMM subscribers:

1. “Shall I Be Mother?” by David Dean (July/August)
2. “Jennifer’s Daughter,” by Doug Allyn (November/December)
3. “Double Parked,” by Twist Phelan (November/December)

Runners-up:
4 (tie). “Murder Can’t Stop De Carnival” by Ashley-Ruth M. Bernier
“The Carfax Lunatic Society,” by David Dean
5 (tie). “Capone’s Castle,” by Doug Allyn
“The Wind Phone” by Josh Pachter
6. “Everybody Pays,” by Jim Allyn
7 (4-way tie). “Knock-Knock,” by Sarah Hillary
“Gannets and Ghouls,” by Sue Parman
“An Ounce of Prevention,” by Twist Phelan
“Old Dog,” by Mike Wheet
8. “The Four-Nine Profile,” by Richard Helms
9 (tie). “Somebody That I Used to Know,” by Sharyn Kolberg
“Streets of Joy,” by Charley Marsh
10 (4-way tie). “The Pasture at Night,” by Doug Crandell
“Commission,” by Leslie Elman
“[The Applause Dies],” by Lori Rader-Day
“Letters From Tokyo,” by Yoshinori Todo

Into Harrogate’s Home Stretch

Seven weeks after releasing the longlist of contenders for Britain’s 2025 Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award, Harrogate International Festivals has announced the half-dozen finalists for that prize, together with the shortlist of candidates for this year’s McDermid Debut Award for new writers.

To begin, here are the Crime Novel of the Year nominees:

• The Cracked Mirror, by Chris Brookmyre (Sphere)
• The Mercy Chair, by M.W. Craven (Constable)
• The Last Word, by Elly Griffiths (Quercus)
• Hunted, by Abir Mukherjee (Harvill Secker)
• Deadly Animals, by Marie Tierney (Zaffre)
• All the Colours of the Dark, by Chris Whitaker (Orion)

Readers are invited to vote for their favorites from among these half-dozen titles. The balloting will end on Thursday, July 10.

Another six books are vying to win the second annual McDermid Debut Award, named for renowned Scottish crime writer Val McDermid:

• Sick to Death, by Chris Bridges (Avon)
• I Died at Fallow Hall, by Bonnie Burke-Patel (Bedford Square)
• Her Two Lives, by Nilesha Chauvet (Faber & Faber)
• A Reluctant Spy, by David Goodman (Headline)
• Isolation Island, by Louise Minchin (Headline)
• Black Water Rising, by Sean Watkin (Canelo)

The winners of both these commendations are set to be revealed on Thursday, July 17—the opening night of this year’s Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate, England.

Strolling SF’s Storied Streets

Are you planning to be in San Francisco on Saturday, June 21? If so, you might consider joining a crime fiction-themed walking tour of that historic city’s downtown Tenderloin district.

A description of this “Tenderloin Noir” excursion, sponsored by the Tenderloin Museum, says it “traces the dark footprints of hard-boiled writers like Dashiell Hammett, Ross Macdonald, and Mark Coggins—authors who turned the Tenderloin’s alleys, hotels, and shadowy corners into settings for murder, mischief, and moral ambiguity.” Historian Linda Day will lead the tour, which is set to run from 2 to 3:30 p.m. More information and tickets are available here.

Time Catches Up to Two Trailblazers

(Above) James McEachin starred as a private eye in Tenafly opposite David Huddleston (left), who played his chief police contact, Lieutenant Sam Church.

As if the news lately hasn’t been bad enough, for various reasons, now comes word that two groundbreaking Black TV actors have died.

The first is James McEachin, “who,” The Hollywood Reporter recalls, “wrote and produced songs for Otis Redding before turning to acting to portray cops on his own NBC Mystery Movie series and in 18 of the popular Perry Mason telefilms.” The North Carolina-born performer and author passed away on January 11 of this year at age 94, but wasn’t buried until last month at Los Angeles National Cemetery.

McEachin served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, went from there to become a firefighter and a policeman in New Jersey, and eventually moved way out to California, where he worked for a time as a record producer. His first acting role was in the 1966 film I Crossed the Color Line (aka The Black Klansman). He subsequently signed on as a contract player with the film and TV company Universal, appearing in movies such as True Grit (1969) and Hello, Dolly! (1969) and on shows ranging from Mannix, Hawaii Five-O, The Bold Ones, and It Takes a Thief to The Name of the Game, Dragnet 1967, and Ironside.

In 1973 McEachin earned top billing in Tenafly, one of four rotating segments of the NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie. He played Harry Tenafly, a middle-class, suburban family man and former cop now working for a large, bean-counting private investigations agency. The program, created by Richard Levinson and William Link of Columbo fame, was one of two debuting that fall to be built around Black gumshoes; the other was Shaft with Richard Roundtree. As McEachin told Francis Murphy, who in 1973 was the TV columnist for the Portland Oregonian, Levinson and Link had designed Harry Tenafly to be portrayed by Warren Oates (The Wild Bunch, Dillinger), but Universal said it would only pick it up if the private eye was Black. Tenafly joined George Peppard’s Banacek, Helen Hayes and Mildred Natwick’s The Snoop Sisters, and Dan Dailey’s Faraday and Company as second-season components of the Wednesday Mystery Movie (the sister to NBC’s Sunday Mystery Movie). Unfortunately, just a pilot film for Tenafly and four additional 90-minute episodes were shot before Universal pulled the plug on that whole “wheel series.” (At least for the time being, you can watch the pilot here.)

McEachin later guest starred on The Rockford Files, Harry O, Police Story, Quincy, M.E., Hill Street Blues, and a lengthy list of other American dramas. Aside from his multiple appearances in Perry Mason telefilms, his only other regular TV gig was on the 2002 CBS mid-season replacement series First Monday. He played a liberal U.S. Supreme Court justice opposite James Garner and Joe Mantegna.

The Hollywood Reporter notes that the actor “was appointed a U.S. Army Reserve Ambassador in 2005 to spend time speaking with soldiers and veterans.” He also starred in a one-man play, Above the Call; Beyond the Duty, which opened at Washington, D.C.’s Kennedy Center back in 2008, and penned several books, among them a 2021 memoir titled Swing Low My Sweet Chariot.

From what I can tell, no cause of death has been announced.

* * *

We must also bid good-bye to Ena Hartman, who is remembered as one of the first Black female performers to win a regular role on an American TV series. She played sharp, levelheaded police dispatcher Katy Grant in the 1970-1971 ABC crime series Dan August, which starred Burt Reynolds as a police lieutenant working homicide investigations in the Southern California coastal town of Santa Luisa (a fictional place supposedly based on Santa Barbara).

Hartman died in Van Nuys, California, on April 16, of what online sources say were “natural causes.” She was 93 years old.

The Hollywood Reporter explains that Hartman was born Gerthaline Henry on April 1, 1932, in Moscow, Arkansas, “the daughter of sharecroppers.” After dropping out of high school in order to open a restaurant and make some money, she hightailed it to New York City, where she took on a stage name, became a popular model, and studied drama. She made her acting debuts in 1964, appearing in both the big-screen film The New Interns and an episode of the TV series Bonanza. She went on to accept a small part in the 1966 movie Our Man Flint, and earned guest spots on such boob-tube favorites as Adam-12, The Name of the Game, It Takes a Thief, The Outsider, and Ironside. In addition, she played a nurse in Prescription: Murder, the unofficial first pilot for Columbo. It’s said that Hartman had been in the running to play Lieutenant Uhura on NBC’s original Star Trek series, but lost out to Nichelle Nichols. In 1973 she was cast in the violent prison-set picture Terminal Island starring Tom Selleck, but injured her ankle and had to reduce her participation in action scenes. The International Movie Database (IMDb) gives Hartman’s final on-screen credit as a 1975 episode of Police Story.

Dan August’s main title sequence is embedded below.

Women on Top Down Under

Sisters in Crime Australia has released its longlists of contenders for the 25th Davitt Awards. There are four categories of “best crime and mystery books”: Adult Novels, Non-fiction, Young Adult Novels, and Children’s Novels. Here are the Adult Novels candidates:

• The Rewilding, by Donna M. Cameron (Transit Lounge)
• Safe Haven, by Shankari Chandran (Ultimo Press)
• Woman, Missing, by Sherryl Clark (HQ)
• Red River Road, by Anna Downes (Affirm Press)
• The Cryptic Clue, by Amanda Hampson (Penguin Random
House Australia)
• What I Would Do to You, by Georgia Harper (Penguin Random
House Australia)
• The Creeper, by Margaret Hickey (Penguin Random House Australia)
• The Chilling, by Riley James (Allen & Unwin)
• Highway 13, by Fiona McFarlane (Allen & Unwin)
• What Happened to Nina? by Dervla McTiernan (HarperCollins Australia)
• The Search Party, by Hannah Richell (Simon & Schuster Australia)
• The Crag, by Claire Sutherland (Affirm Press)
• Gone, by Glenna Thompson (Penguin Random House Australia)
• To the River, by Vikki Wakefield (Text)
• Vengeance Planning for Amateurs, by Lee Winter (Ylva)

You will find all of the longlists here. The 600-plus members of Sisters in Crime Australia will also be asked to select a Readers’ Award Choice recipient; voting in that race will open shortly and is scheduled to close on Sunday, July 27.

This year’s shortlists of nominees are expected in July, with the winners to be named during a late August dinner in Melbourne.

(Hat tip to In Reference to Murder.)

The Cream of Canada’s Crop

That was quick! Just a month after releasing its shortlist of nominees for the 2025 Awards of Excellence in Canadian Crime Writing, the Crime Writers of Canada has announced the winners of those prizes.

The Miller-Martin Award for Best Crime Novel:
Prairie Edge, by Conor Kerr (Strange Light)

Also nominated: Wild Houses, by Colin Barrett (McClelland & Stewart); The Specimen, by Jaima Fixsen (Poisoned Pen Press); Mr. Good-Evening, by John MacLachlan Gray (Douglas & McIntyre); and The Grey Wolf, by Louise Penny (Minotaur)

Best Crime First Novel:
Twenty-Seven Minutes, by Ashley Tate (Doubleday Canada)

Also nominated: The Burden of Truth, by Suzan Denoncourt (Suzan Denoncourt); The Roaring Game Murders, by Peter Holloway (Bonspiel); Altered Boy, by Jim McDonald (Amalit); and We Were the Bullfighters, by Marianne K. Miller (Dundurn Press)

Best Crime Novel Set in Canada:
As We Forgive Others, by Shane Peacock (Cormorant)

Also nominated: Fatal Harvest, by Brenda Chapman (Ivy Bay Press); The War Machine, by Barry W. Levy (Double Dagger); Who by Fire, by Greg Rhyno (Cormorant); and The Call, by Kerry Wilkinson (Bookouture)

The Whodunit Award for Best Traditional Mystery:
Black Ice, by Thomas King (HarperCollins)

Also nominated: The Corpse with the Pearly Smile, by Cathy Ace (Four Tails); The Dead Shall Inherit, by Raye Anderson (Signature Editions); A Meditation on Murder, by Susan Juby (HarperCollins); and Concert Hall Killer, by Jonathan Whitelaw (HarperNorth)

Best Crime Novella:
“The Windmill Mystery,” by Pamela Jones (Austin Macauley)

Also nominated: “Chuck Berry Is Missing,” by Marcelle Dubé (Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, July/August 2024); “Mrs. Claus and the Candy Corn Caper,” by Liz Ireland (Kensington); “A Rock,” by A.J. McCarthy (Black Rose Writing); and “Aim,” by Twist Phelan (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, March/April 2024)

Best Crime Short Story:
“Hatcheck Bingo,” by Therese Greenwood (from The 13th Letter, Mesdames and Messieurs of Mayhem; Carrick)

Also nominated: “Farmer Knudson,” by Catherine Astolfo (from Auntie Beers: A Book of Connected Short Stories, by Catherine Astolfo; Carrick); “Houdini Act,” by Billie Livingston (Saturday Evening Post, July 26, 2024); “The Electrician,” Linda Sanche (from Crime Wave3: Dangerous Games; Canada West); “The Longest Night of the Year,” Melissa Yi (Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, November/December 2024)

Best French Language Crime Book:
Une mémoire de lion, by Guillaume Morrissette (Saint-Jean)

Also nominated: La femme papillon, by J.L. Blanchard (Fides); Le crime du garçon exquis, by R. Lavallée (Fides); L’Affaire des montants, by Jean Lemieux (Québec Amérique); and Fracture, by Johanne Seymour (Libre Expression)

Best Juvenile/YA Crime Book:
Shock Wave, by Sigmund Brouwer (Orca)

Also nominated: The Time Keeper, by Meagan Mahoney (DCB Young Readers); Snowed, by Twist Phelan (Bronzeville); The Dark Won’t Wait, by David A. Poulsen (Red Deer Press); and The Red Rock Killer, by Melissa Yi (Windtree Press)

The Brass Knuckles Award for Best Non-fiction Crime Book:
(Tie) Out of Darkness: Rumana Monzur’s Journey Through Betrayal, Tyranny and Abuse, by Denise Chong (Random House Canada); and The Knowing, by Tanya Talaga (HarperCollins)

Also nominated: Atrocity on the Atlantic: Attack on a Hospital Ship During the Great War, by Nate Hendley (Dundurn Press); The Rest of the [True Crime] Story, by John L. Hill (AOS); and A Gentleman and a Thief: The Daring Jewel Heists of a Jazz Age Rogue, by Dean Jobb (HarperCollins)

Best Unpublished Crime Novel (manuscript written by an unpublished author): Govern Yourself Accordingly, by Luke Devlin

Also nominated: The Man in the Black Hat, by Robert Bowerman; Dark Waters, by Delee Fromm; A Trail’s Tears, by Lorrie Potvin; and Predators in the Shadows, by William Watt

In addition, Canadian novelist, activist, and criminal lawyer William H. Deverell received the 2025 Derrick Murdoch Award, honoring “individuals who have made significant contributions to developing crime writing in Canada.”

The surprise here is that Dean Jobb’s A Gentleman and a Thief didn’t win in the non-fiction category. I loved that book, as I had his 2021 work, The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream: The Hunt for a Victorian Era Serial Killer, about remorseless Canadian poisoner Thomas Neill Cream. But I didn’t read either of the two books that did win, so I cannot say that they were any less exceptional.

Hits with Brits: 2025 Dagger Nominees

After recently signing up several new sponsors for its prestigious annual Dagger Awards, Britain’s Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) today announced its 2025 shortlists of candidates for those prizes—including two new ones, the Twisted Dagger and the Whodunnit Dagger.

KAA Gold Dagger:
• A Divine Fury, by D.V. Bishop (Macmillan)
• The Bell Tower, by R.J. Ellory (Orion)
• The Hunter, by Tana French (Penguin)
• Guide Me Home, by Attica Locke (Profile)
• The Book of Secrets, by Anna Mazzola (Orion)
• I Died at Fallow Hall, by Bonnie Burke-Patel (Bedford Square)

Ian Fleming Steel Dagger:
• Dark Ride, by Lou Berney (Hemlock Press)
• Nobody’s Hero, by M.W. Craven (Constable)
• Sanctuary, by Garry Disher (Viper)
• Hunted, by Abir Mukherjee (Harvill & Secker)
• Blood Like Mine, by Stuart Neville (Simon & Schuster)
• City in Ruins, by Don Winslow (Hemlock Press)

ILP John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger:
• Miss Austen Investigates, by Jessica Bull (Michael Joseph)
• Knife River, by Justine Champine (Manilla Press)
• Three Burials, by Anders Lustgarten (Hamish Hamilton)
• A Curtain Twitcher’s Book of Murder, by Gay Marris (Bedford Square)
• All Us Sinners, by Katy Massey (Sphere)
• Deadly Animals, by Marie Tierney (Zaffre)

Historical Dagger:
• A Divine Fury, by D.V. Bishop (Macmillan)
• Banquet of Beggars, by Chris Lloyd (Orion)
• The Book of Secrets, by Anna Mazzola (Orion)
• The Betrayal of Thomas True, by A.J. West (Orenda)
• Poor Girls, by Clare Whitfield (Head of Zeus/Aries)

Crime Fiction in Translation Dagger:
• Dogs and Wolves, by Hervé Le Corre,
translated by Howard Curtis (Europa Editions UK)
• Going to the Dogs, by Pierre Lemaitre,
translated by Frank Wynne (Maclehose Press)
• The Night of Baby Yaga, by Akira Otani,
translated by Sam Bett (Faber & Faber)
• The Clues in the Fjord, by Satu Rämö,
translated by Kristian London (Zaffre)
• Butter, by Asako Yuzuki,
translated by Polly Barton (4th Estate)
• Clean, by Alia Trabucco Zerán,
translated by Sophie Hughes (4th Estate)

ALCS Gold Dagger for Non-fiction:
• Unmasking Lucy Letby: The Untold Story of the Killer Nurse, by Jonathan Coffey and Judith Moritz (Seven Dials)
• The Lady in the Lake: A Reporter’s Memoir of a Murder, by Jeremy Craddock (Mirror)
• Framed: Astonishing True Stories of Wrongful Convictions, by John Grisham and Jim McCloskey (Hodder & Stoughton)
• The Criminal Mind, by Duncan Harding (Michael Joseph)
• Four Shots in the Night: A True Story of Stakeknife, Murder, and Justice in Northern Ireland, by Henry Hemming (Quercus)
• The Peepshow: The Murders at 10 Rillington Place, by Kate Summerscale (Bloomsbury Circus)

Short Story Dagger:
• “The Glorious Twelfth,” by S.J. Bennett (from Midsummer Mysteries, edited by Martin Edwards; Flame Tree)
• “A Date on Yarmouth Pier,” by J.C. Bernthal (from Midsummer Mysteries)
• “Why Harrogate?” by Janice Hallett (from Murder in Harrogate, edited by Vaseem Khan; Orion)
• “City Without Shadows,” by William Burton McCormick (from Midsummer Mysteries)
• “A Ruby Sun,” by Meeti Shroff-Shah (from Midsummer Mysteries)
• “Murder at the Turkish Baths,” by Ruth Ware (from Murder in Harrogate)

Whodunnit Dagger (for “cosy crime, traditional mysteries, and Golden Age crime” stories):
• A Death in Diamonds, by S.J. Bennett (Zaffre)
• Murder at the Christmas Emporium, by Andreina Cordani (Zaffre)
• The Case of the Singer and the Showgirl, by Lisa Hall (Hera)
• A Good Place to Hide a Body, by Laura Marshall (Hodder & Stoughton)
• A Matrimonial Murder, by Meeti Shroff-Shah (Joffe)
• Murder at the Matinee, by Jamie West (Brabinger)

Twisted Dagger (for “psychological and suspense thrillers”):
• Emma, Disappeared, by Andrew Hughes (Hachette Ireland)
• Beautiful People, by Amanda Jennings (HQ)
• The Stranger in Her House, by John Marrs (Thomas & Mercer)
• The Trials of Marjorie Crowe, by C.S. Robertson (Hodder & Stoughton)
• Nightwatching, by Tracy Sierra (Viking)
• Look in the Mirror, by Catherine Steadman (Quercus)

Dagger in the Library (“for a body of work by an established crime writer that has long been popular with borrowers from libraries”):
• Kate Atkinson
• Robert Galbraith
• Janice Hallett
• Lisa Jewell
• Edward Marston
• Richard Osman

Publishers’ Dagger (“awarded annually to the Best Crime and Mystery Publisher of the Year”):
• Bitter Lemon Press
• Faber & Faber
• Orenda Books
• Pan Macmillan
• Simon & Schuster

Emerging Author Dagger (“for the opening of a crime novel by an unpublished writer,” formerly called the Debut Dagger):
• Loftus Brown, Bahadur Is My Name
• Shannon Chamberlain, Funeral Games
• Hywel Davies, Soho Love, Soho Blood
• Joe Eurell, Ashland
• Shannon Falkson, The Fifth
• Catherine Lovering, Murder Under Wraps

The winners in each of these categories will be revealed during an awards ceremony in London on July 3.

Mick Herron, author of the Slough House series, was previously announced as this year’s recipient of the CWA Diamond Dagger.

Bullet Points: Novedecennial Edition

• Today marks 19 years since The Rap Sheet was launched as a blog separate from January Magazine. I’m not really in the mood to make a big deal of this occasion; I would prefer to reserve that for our 20th-anniversary celebration. But let me share a couple of statistics. November of last year saw the publication of our 9,000th post. Over the five succeeding months, we’ve put up another 124. And as of today, The Rap Sheet has registered 10,084,287 pageviews. Thank you to everyone who has found value in this site over the years!

• In Reference to Murder brings word that “Netflix has ordered a series adaptation of S.A. Cosby’s [2023] novel, All the Sinners Bleed, from the Obamas’ Higher Ground and Amblin Television. The story follows the first Black sheriff in a small Bible Belt county, haunted by his past in the FBI and his devout mother’s untimely death, as he must lead the hunt for a serial killer who has quietly been preying on Black communities in Southern Virginia for years in the name of God. Joe Robert Cole (Black Panther) will adapt and serve as showrunner for the nine-part series.” Sinners placed on many best books of 2023 lists.

• Prolific novelist James Reasoner gives a hearty thumbs-up to the new, 12th issue of Men’s Adventure Quarterly, which is devoted to fictional private eyes. The contents include vintage tales by Michael Avallone, Frank Kane, Walter Kaylin, and G.G. Fickling (represented in these pages by “The Red Hairing,” the only Honey West short story); Reasoner’s own essay about detectives in Western fiction; a survey of new Sherlock Holmes pastiches by Paul Bishop; “plus a feature on early Sixties TV series 77 Sunset Strip and Hawaian Eye, both of which were favorites of mine, especially 77 Sunset Strip,” writes Reasoner. “I never missed an episode back in those days. If you’re the right age, you can hear the show’s theme song in your head right now, can’t you? I miss the Sixties just thinking about all this stuff!” I just bought a copy of the magazine here.

• In CrimeReads, Los Angeles lawyer Bruce Riordan celebrates Ross Macdonald’s 1958 crime novel, The Doomsters, as “a turning point in the history of crime fiction.” He adds: “After six well written, but not quite original, Lew Archer novels, Ross Macdonald was searching for something original. With The Doomsters, he broke away from the influence of Raymond Chandler, the writer who cast a giant shadow over Macdonald and American crime fiction.”

• Author Don Winslow (California Fire and Life, The Dawn Patrol, City in Ruins) has been named as the editor of Mariner Books’ The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2025 anthology.

• This will force me to locate and replace many Rap Sheet links, especially in our regular “Revue of Reviewers” posts: The excellent free review site New York Journal of Books, which debuted in 2010 “to fill the gap left by the newspaper book review sections that have folded in recent years,” just recently folded itself. Publishers Weekly quotes founder Ted Sturtz as blaming Donald Trump’s tariff chaos for his site’s failure. He observes that NYJB “relied on Amazon commissions and Google Adsense for revenue … The wide-ranging tariffs imposed by the Trump administration last month, he explained, ‘transform[ed] consumer behavior so that these revenues entirely collapsed. This was so quick and breathtaking that we in a very short ... time saw our revenues sink from a surplus to a fraction of our costs.’” He stresses: “Our actual undoing was not publishing industry conditions. It was the current tariff war.”

• The Rap Sheet dumped Twitter/X back in January. Now the Chicago Review of Books is doing the same, “because why be part of a crypto-neo-Nazi-hellsphere when we could, just, well, not.” Like this blog, CHIRB has moved its social media activities to Bluesky.

• Hart to Hart’s Stefanie Powers profiled by TV Guide in 1980.

• The British Crime Writers’ Association has announced that it has two new sponsors for its annual Dagger awards.

• And after much hemming and hawing, I have finally made arrangements to attend Bouchercon 2025 in New Orleans. I haven’t been to the Big Easy since the last Bouchercon held there, back in 2016. This time, my good friend and fellow Rap Sheeter Ali Karim will serve as International Fan Guest of Honor, so I could hardly excuse myself from the festivities. See a list of other attendees here.

Smiley Books Passage for America

Following the success of Karla’s Choice, Nick Harkaway’s 2024 novel continuing the espionage adventures of George Smiley—the series protagonist introduced by his late father, John le Carré, in Call for the Dead (1961)—the author has concocted a sequel, The Taper Man, to be published in 2026. Shotsmag Confidential reports that

In his new novel, Nick Harkaway will send George Smiley for the first time on an operation to America, pursuing an old communist network across the West Coast. It’s 1965, eighteen months after the events of Karla’s Choice, and within the missing decade between the two instalments in the Smiley Saga, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold [1963] and ...Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy [1974]. Against the backdrop of the Civil Rights era and the Vietnam War, Smiley finds himself dealing with a crisis involving the ‘Cousins’, which throws him once again in a struggle to find a path in the dark. To whom does he owe his allegiance? To this investigation in America or to the wider geopolitical gameboard?

In related news, a stage adaptation of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold is set to premiere this fall in London’s West End. “Adapted by award-winning playwright and screenwriter David Eldridge and directed by Jeremy Herrin,” writes Shotsmag’s Ayo Onatade, “this is the first novel by the undisputed master of the modern spy genre to be brought to life on London’s stage. Following a sold-out premiere at Chichester Festival Theatre in 2024, the play will be produced by Ink Factory and Second Half Productions in association with Nica Burns.”

Revue of Reviewers: 5-18-25

Critiquing some of the most interesting recent crime, mystery, and thriller releases. Click on the individual covers to read more.