Of Surveys, Series, and Circus Clowns

• After having solicited numerous nominations online for its annual Dead Good Reader Awards, the British crime-fiction Web site Dead Good is now asking people to vote for their favorites in six categories, everything from The Nosy Parker Award for Best Amateur Detective and The Jury’s Out Award for Most Gripping Courtroom Drama to The Cat and Mouse Award for Most Elusive Villain. Included among the candidates this year are The Taking of Annie Thorne, by C.J. Tudor; Thirteen, by Steve Cavanagh; The Passengers, by John Marrs; and Beautiful Liars, by Isabel Ashdown. Click here to take part in this competition. Polls will remain open through Wednesday, July 17, with winners set to be announced on Friday, July 19, at the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate, England.

• If five seasons of Bosch haven’t already satisfied your craving for Michael Connelly television adaptations, then here’s good news: Deadline reports that CBS-TV “has given a series production commitment to The Lincoln Lawyer.” David E. Kelly, creator of The Practice and Ally McBeal, will apparently write the show and serve as one of its three executive producers, along with Connelly and Ross Fineman (Goliath). As with the 2011 big-screen picture based on Connelly’s novel of the same name, CBS’ The Lincoln Lawyer “centers on Mickey Haller, an iconoclastic idealist, who runs his law practice out of the back of his Lincoln Town Car, as he takes on cases big and small across the expansive city of Los Angeles.” There’s no word yet on who’ll play Haller in the series.

• Believe it or not, there’s still no official news yet regarding which books and authors are finalists for the 2019 Nero Award, to be given out by The Wolfe Pack, a New York City-based Nero Wolfe/Archie Goodwin fan organization. In mid-June, Mystery Fanfare blogger Janet Rudolph posted a partial list of contenders—The Fallen Architect, by Charles Belfoure, and The Man Who Couldn’t Miss, by David Handler—based solely on Web chatter. However, that’s everything either she or I know so far. I have e-mailed Nero Award chair Stephannie Culbertson in search of information, but have heard nothing back. Last year’s Nero recipient was August Snow, by Stephen Mack Jones.

• CrimeReads has released an inventory of what its editors believe are “the best books of the year (so far).” Among those 25 picks are Lauren Wilkinson’s American Spy, Don Winslow’s The Border, Niklas Natt och Dag’s The Wolf and the Watchman, Lyndsay Faye’s The Paragon Hotel, Philip Kerr’s Metropolis, and Ausma Zehanat Khan’s A Deadly Divide. Several of CrimeReads’ choices also appeared on my own my own list of early 2019 crime-fiction preferences.

• Crime-fiction expert and Financial Times contributor Barry Forshaw selects four novels he thinks every reader of crime and mystery fiction should investigate this summer.

• Tim Mason, author The Darwin Affair, recalls Charles Dickens’ great interest in London’s mid-19th-century police force, which helped give rise to what was “perhaps his greatest novel,” Bleak House (1853). In turn, it was Bleak House that inspired Mason’s excellent new historical mystery, The Darwin Affair, which stars Scotland Yard detective Charles Frederick Field, the often impulsive flesh-and-blood model for Dickens’ famous Inspector Bucket.

• In a two-part post for his blog, Mysteries and More from Saskatchewan (see here and here), attorney Bill Selnes reassess the controversial involvement of New York City prosecutor-turned-novelist Linda Fairstein in the notorious Central Park Five case. It was her role in that pursuit of charges against five alleged teenage rapists (beginning in 1990) that has led of late to the Mystery Writers of America withdrawing her nomination as one of its Grand Masters, and to her publisher booting Fairstein from its stable.

• For Mystery Scene magazine, Ben Boulden surveys the long, colorful history of mysteries set around circuses and carnivals.

• New Zealand actress-singer Lucy Lawless, best known for her ass-kicking role in Xena: Warrior Princess (1995–2001), is returning to television—at least in Australia. According to The Killing Times, she will play Alexa Crowe, “a brilliant, charismatic and ever-so-slightly scruffy ex-homicide detective,” in My Life Is Murder, a 10-part crime drama scheduled to debut Down Under within the next several weeks. Let’s hope this show eventually makes it to the States.

• And who remembers the 1985 made-for-TV movie Izzy and Moe, featuring Jackie Gleason and Art Carney (formerly co-stars of The Honeymooners) as a pair of Prohibition-era federal cops, their characters based on highly successful, real-life liquor-law enforcers? At least for the nonce, that 92-minute film is available on YouTube in 10 parts. Watch it now, before it disappears!

Faulty Pursuits of Justice

Until now, I’ve chosen to leave the reporting on New York prosecutor-turned-author Linda Fairstein’s recent downfall to other media outlets. I don’t have unique knowledge of the story or any original angle from which to approach it. And I see no reason to comment on Fairstein’s situation simply for the sake of reading my opinions in print. (I already wrote, late last year, about the Mystery Writers of America’s decision to withdraw her nomination as one of its Grand Masters.)

However, I think it’s worth pointing readers of this page to a piece in yesterday’s Washington Post, penned by critic and author Sarah Weinman (The Real Lolita), that offers some useful perspective on Fairstein’s plight and public service career. It begins:

The month of June has not been kind to Linda Fairstein, the former head of the sex-crimes division of the Manhattan district attorney’s office. Since Ava DuVernay’s limited Netflix series “When They See Us” debuted on May 31, the prosecutor-turned-bestselling crime writer has been under fire for her role in shaping the prosecution of the group of wrongfully convicted teens who became known as the Central Park Five. (I know Fairstein slightly through the world of crime writing.) Dutton, her longtime book publisher, and ICM Partners, her longtime agency, both dropped her, and social media campaigns spurred her to resign from the boards of the victims’ resource group Safe Horizon and Vassar College.

Fairstein’s fall is the result of a long-overdue public reckoning with New York’s response to the 1989 rape and attempted murder of Trisha Meili, the crime for which the Five were wrongly imprisoned. In measuring the cost of that case, it isn’t simply that Fairstein played a role in pursuing the wrong suspects. It’s that, as I wrote earlier this month, other women were assaulted, raped, and in one instance, murdered by Matias Reyes, the man solely responsible for the attack on Meili. The New York Police Department and the prosecutor’s office failed these women, some of whom were attacked after Meili, because they believed, incorrectly, that Meili was just one victim of a crime wave taking place in Central Park that night.

Our reckoning also needs to go beyond the Central Park jogger case. Fairstein joined an unjust system in the 1970s and, at first, she helped revolutionize certain aspects of that system. But, as our ideas about the criminal-justice system evolved, hers did not. Neither the excoriating op-ed Fairstein wrote in her own defense, nor Felicity Huffman’s villainous portrayal of her in “When They See Us” captures the full arc of what happened to Fairstein—and why it matters for the rest of us.

Again, you’ll find Weinman’s whole piece here.

READ MORE: “Linda Fairstein, Former 'Central Park 5' Prosecutor, Dropped By Her Publisher,” by Colin Dwyer (NPR); “The Slippery Moral Calculus of Linda Fairstein,” by Monica Hesse (The Washington Post); “Trump Still Refuses to Admit He Was Wrong About the Central Park 5,” by Aaron Rupar (Vox).

MWA Withdraws Fairstein’s Award

Just two days after the Mystery Writers of America (MWA) announced that author Linda Fairstein would be one of its two Grand Master Award recipients for 2019 (along with Martin Cruz Smith), the organization has chosen to rescind its award to Fairstein.

This follows complaints, expressed online by Edgar Award-winning novelist Attica Locke and others, that Fairstein—who, prior to her literary career, headed up the sex-crimes unit of the Manhattan District Attorney’s office—had been instrumental in “the wrongful incarceration of the Central Park Five,” a group of teenage boys who were prosecuted in 1990 for allegedly attacking a woman jogger in New York City’s Central Park. The five boys were African American and Hispanic; the woman was white. Their convictions were vacated in 2002 after another man admitted to having committed the attack.

The MWA has issued the following statement:

On Tuesday, November 27, Mystery Writers of America announced the recipients of Grand Master, Raven & Ellery Queen Awards, special awards given out annually. Shortly afterwards, the MWA membership began to express concern over the inclusion of Linda Fairstein as a Grand Master, citing controversy in which she has been involved.

When the MWA Board made its selection, it was unaware of Ms. Fairstein’s role in the controversy.

After profound reflection, the Board has decided that MWA cannot move forward with an award that lacks the support of such a large percentage of our members. Therefore, the Board of Directors has decided to withdraw the Linda Fairstein Grand Master award. We realize that this action will be unsatisfactory to many. We apologize for any pain and disappointment this situation has caused.

MWA will be reevaluating and significantly revising its procedures for selecting honorary awards in the future. We hope our members will all work with us to move forward from this extremely troubling event and continue to build a strong and inclusive organization.

To read more about the Central Park Five case and this Grand Master controversy, refer to this story in today’s New York Times.

Making Masters of Smith and Fairstein

Authors Martin Cruz Smith and Linda Fairstein (shown above) have been selected by the Mystery Writers of America as the winners of its 2019 Grand Master Awards. To quote from an MWA news release:

MWA’s Grand Master Award represents the pinnacle of achievement in mystery writing and was established to acknowledge important contributions to this genre, as well as for a body of work that is both significant and of consistent high quality. Ms. Fairstein and Mr. Smith will receive their awards at the 73rd Annual Edgar Awards Banquet, which will be held at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York City on April 25, 2019.”

Previous Grand Masters include William Link, Peter Lovesey, Jane Langton, Max Allan Collins, Ellen Hart, Walter Mosley, James Ellroy, Robert Crais, Carolyn Hart, Ken Follett, Margaret Maron, Martha Grimes, Bill Pronzini, Sara Paretsky, and James Lee Burke.

At the same time, the MWA has announced that veteran New York Times mystery-fiction columnist Marilyn Stasio will be the recipient of this next year’s Raven Award (honoring “outstanding achievement in the mystery field outside the realm of creative writing”). And Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine editor Linda Landrigan is to be given the 2019 Ellery Queen Award, which recognizes “outstanding writing teams and outstanding people in the mystery-publishing industry.”

Congratulations to all of these prize winners.

UPDATE: The MWA seems to have stirred up more than a bit of controversy with its decision to name prosecutor-turned-novelist Linda Fairstein as one of this year’s Grand Masters. Author Attica Locke (Bluebird, Bluebird) wrote this morning on Twitter:

As a member and 2018 Edgar winner, I am begging you to reconsider having Linda Fairstein serve as a Grand Master in next year’s awards ceremony. She is almost single-handedly responsible for the wrongful incarceration of the Central Park Five. … For which she has never apologized or recanted her insistence on their guilt for the most heinous of crimes, ‘guilt’ based solely on evidence procured through violence and ill treatment of children in lock up.”

Locke is referring here to a case brought by Fairstein, in her then-role as head of the sex crimes unit of the Manhattan District Attorney’s office, against five teenage boys—four African Americans and one Hispanic—who allegedly attacked a white female jogger in Central Park on the night of April 19, 1989. Charges were leveled against Fairstein that she and police detectives had intimidated the arrested teens into making false confessions. In 1990, all of the Central Park Five, as they became known, were convicted on charges of assault and sexual battery; but those convictions were vacated in 2002 after another man, “convicted serial rapist and murderer Matias Reyes,” confessed to having attacked the woman instead.

This afternoon, the MWA put out the following message: “We are taking seriously the issues raised by Attica Locke. Our Board is going to discuss these concerns as soon as possible and make a further statement soon.” Stay tuned for more on this matter.

READ MORE: “Writer Linda Fairstein’s Past as a Prosecutor Overseeing the Central Park Five Case Causes Award Controversy,” by Steph Cha (Los Angeles Times).