Going Short on the Daggers

This seems to happen all too often. I go out of town for a couple of days, just to relax a bit and escape the persistent siren’s call of my computer, and in my absence all sorts of things happen in the world of crime fiction. Yesterday, for instance, the British Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) announced its shortlists of nominees for the 2017 Dagger awards. (The longlists were released in May.) The results are below.

CWA Gold Dagger:
• The Beautiful Dead, by Belinda Bauer (Bantam Press)
• Dead Man’s Blues, by Ray Celestin (Mantle)
• The Dry, by Jane Harper (Little, Brown)
• Spook Street, by Mick Herron (John Murray)
• The Girl in Green, by Derek B. Miller (Faber and Faber)
• A Rising Man, by Abir Muckerjee (Harvil Secker)

CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger:
• You Will Know Me, by Megan Abbott (Picador)
• The Killing Game, by J.S. Carol (Bookouture)
• We Go Around in the Night Consumed by Fire, by Jules Grant
(Myriad Editions)
• Redemption Road, by John Hart (Hodder & Stoughton)
• Spook Street, by Mick Herron (John Murray)
• The Constant Soldier, by William Ryan (Mantle)

CWA John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger:
• The Pictures, by Guy Bolton (Point Blank)
• Ragdoll, by Daniel Cole (Trapeze)
• Distress Signals, by Catherine Ryan Howard (Corvus)
• Sirens, by Joseph Knox (Doubleday)
• Good Me, Bad Me, by Ali Land (Michael Joseph)
• Tall Oaks, by Chris Whitaker (Twenty 7)

CWA Non-fiction Dagger:
• A Dangerous Place, by Simon Farquhar (History Press)
• Close But No Cigar: A True Story of Prison Life in Castro’s Cuba,
by Stephen Purvis (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
• The Scholl Case: The Deadly End of a Marriage, by Anja
Reich-Osang (Text)
• The Wicked Boy: The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murderer,
by Kate Summerscale (Bloomsbury)
• A Passing Fury: Searching for Justice at the End of World War II,
by A.T. Williams (Jonathan Cape)
• Another Day in the Death of America, by Gary Younge
(Guardian Faber)

CWA Endeavour Historical Dagger:
• The Devil’s Feast, by M.J. Carter (Fig Tree)
• The Ashes of Berlin, by Luke McCallin (No Exit Press)
• The Long Drop, by Denise Mina (Harvil Secker)
• A Rising Man, by Abir Muckerjee (Harvil Secker)
• By Gaslight, by Steven Price (Point Blank)
• The City in Darkness, by Michael Russell (Constable)

CWA International Dagger:
• A Cold Death, by Antonio Manzini;
translated by Anthony Shugaar (4th Estate)
• A Fine Line, by Gianrico Carofiglio;
translated by Howard Curtis (Bitter Lemon Press)
• Blood Wedding, by Pierre Lemaitre;
translated by Frank Wynne (MacLehose Press)
• Climate of Fear, by Fred Vargas;
translated by Sian Reynolds (Harvill Secker)
• The Dying Detective, by Leif G.W. Persson;
translated by Neil Smith (Doubleday)
• The Legacy of the Bones, by Dolores Redondo;
translated by Nick Caister and Lorenza Garcia (Harper)

CWA Short Story Dagger:
• “The Assassination,” by Leye Adenle (from Sunshine Noir, edited by Anna Maria Alfieri and Michael Stanley; White Sun)
• “Murder and Its Motives,” by Martin Edwards (from Motives for Murder, edited by Martin Edwards; Sphere)
• “The Super Recogniser of Vik,” by Michael Ridpath (from Motives
for Murder)
• “What You Were Fighting For,” by James Sallis (from The Highway Kind, edited by Patrick Millikin; Mulholland)
• “The Trials of Margaret,” by L.C. Tyler (from Motives for Murder)
• “Snakeskin,” by Ovidia Yu (from Sunshine Noir)

CWA Debut Dagger (for unpublished writers):
• Strange Fire, by Sherry Larkin
• The Reincarnation of Himmat Gupte, by Neeraj Shah
• Lost Boys, by Spike Dawkins
• Red Haven, by Mette McLeod
• Broken, by Victoria Slotover

The winners of these commendations are to be declared during a “gala dinner” at London’s Grange City Hotel on Thursday, October 26. During that same event, UK novelist Ann Cleeves will be presented with the Diamond Dagger, and Mari Hannah will receive the Dagger in the Library award. Master of ceremonies for the evening will be author-critic Barry Forshaw (American Noir). For more information or to claim a seat, click here or send an e-mail note to admin@thecwa.co.uk.

I am sorry to see that Andrew Gross’ The One Man (Macmillan) and Linwood Barclay’s The Twenty-Three (Orion) have both failed to make the leap from the longlist to the shortlist of rivals for this year’s Ian Fleming Steel Dagger, and am equally disappointed that Thomas Mullen’s Darktown (Little, Brown) has been eliminated from the running for both the Gold Dagger and Endeavour Historical Dagger. On the other hand, I’m thrilled to see that Steven Price’s By Gaslight—one of my favorite novels of 2017—remains in contention for the Historical Dagger. My fingers are crossed that it will capture the prize!

(Hat tip to Mystery Fanfare.)

READ MORE: “The CWA 2017 Dagger Shortlists,” by Ali Karim (Shotsmag Confidential).