Edgars 2010

The Edgar Awards last night were packed, noisy, glam, and a lot of fun. It was an honor to present Best Paperback Original with Laurie R. King. Congratulations to all the nominees.

The winners:

BEST NOVEL
The Last Child by John Hart (Minotaur Books)

BEST FIRST NOVEL BY AN AMERICAN AUTHOR
In the Shadow of Gotham by Stefanie Pintoff (Minotaur Books)

BEST PAPERBACK ORIGINAL
Body Blows by Marc Strange (Dundurn Press – Castle Street Mysteries)

BEST FACT CRIME
Columbine by Dave Cullen (Hachette Book Group – Twelve)

BEST CRITICAL/BIOGRAPHICAL
The Lineup: The World’s Greatest Crime Writers Tell the Inside Story of Their Greatest Detectives edited by Otto Penzler (Hachette Book Group – Little, Brown and Company)

BEST SHORT STORY
“Amapola” – Phoenix Noir by Luis Alberto Urrea (Akashic Books)

BEST JUVENILE
Closed for the Season by Mary Downing Hahn (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Children’s Books)

BEST YOUNG ADULT
Reality Check by Peter Abrahams (HarperCollins Children’s Books – HarperTeen)

BEST TELEVISION EPISODE TELEPLAY
“Place of Execution,” Teleplay by Patrick Harbinson (PBS/WGBH Boston)

ROBERT L. FISH MEMORIAL AWARD
“A Dreadful Day” – Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine by Dan Warthman (Dell Magazines)

GRAND MASTER
Dorothy Gilman

RAVEN AWARDS
Mystery Lovers Bookshop, Oakmont, Pennsylvania
Zev Buffman, International Mystery Writers’ Festival

ELLERY QUEEN AWARD
Poisoned Pen Press (Barbara Peters & Robert Rosenwald)

More information here.

Friday: Lucien Francoeur talks about Jo and Evan on CNV radio

For all French speakers, Montrealers, Canadians, or anybody else who wants to listen: tomorrow, Friday April 30 , musician and radio host Lucien Francoeur will be talking about my books during his weekly show.

Says Lucien:
“Friday live 11 to 12 noon Eastern
Saturday and Sunday en reprises rerun.”

You can listen to the show online at cnv.ca.

Edgar, deadly?

This morning, as I lay twitching from jet lag, I started thinking about the suspense that lies ahead this evening at the Edgar Awards. That is: will I climb the stairs to the stage to present Best Paperback Original, wearing heels, without tripping and taking a Jackie Chan-style header into the table where the Edgar statuettes are lined up? At which point the Husband brought in the morning paper and said: “You’re in trouble.”

He handed me the Wall Street Journal.

On page one of Greater New York section, along the banner at the top, was a color picture of Edgar Allan Poe and the headline: “Winner’s Curse At Edgar Awards.”

Sweet Jeebus. What happens to Edgar winners? Do we go insane? End up working as Walmart greeters, struggling to welcome people to the store with with just the right words? I grabbed the paper from him.

Winners at tonight’s annual Edgar Awards, presented by the Mystery Writers of America, should relish the victory–the first Edgar is often the last.

Do winners spontaneously combust, like Spinal Tap drummers? What happens if more than one winner is at a table tonight? If I sit across from Harlan Coben, could there be a reaction, like matter and anti-matter colliding, that destroys the table in a flash of exploding plates and flowers and rubber chicken and editors?

The group has doled out awards to crime and mystery novelists since 1946, but few writers collect multiple awards in major categories during the course of their careers.

That’s it? It’s rare to win an Edgar? It’s difficult to win even once, which makes the award even more treasured? Thank God. Now I can go back to worrying that if I trip on the stairs and careen off the stage, I don’t take out Lee Child and Laura Lippman.

New York City: the view from my window

De rigueur shot from my hotel room window. That’s the Empire State Building looming above the others in the shot.

And now it’s back to my prep for for the Edgars, a process Christa Faust describes as involving “serious girl tech.”

Yes, the Edgars are tomorrow night. For somebody who spends most of her days in ragged jeans and a Stanford cross-country T-shirt, getting ready for a black tie awards banquet is a sustained, a two-day assault.

This week: The Edgars

Tomorrow I’m flying to New York. The Edgars will be awarded on Thursday night, and the Mystery Writers of America have graciously invited me to co-present the Edgar for Best Paperback Original. Laurie R. King and I get to do the honors. Excellent.

Many thanks to the MWA, which last year presented me with the statuette pictured here. And many thanks to Eyjafjallajökull for not blowing my plans with volcanic ash.

Do haggis hunt in packs?

Britons believe haggis roams the hills.

(Reuters) – One in five people in Britain thinks that haggis, the traditional Scottish dish made from the lung, liver and heart of a sheep, is an animal that roams the Highlands.

…[T]he survey found that 18 percent of Britons believe that haggis is a hilltop-dwelling animal.

Another 15 percent said it is a Scottish musical instrument while 4 percent admitted to thinking it was a character from Harry Potter.

Huh. And here I thought it was late-night drink boiled up by Macbeth’s witches in their cauldron. “How now, you secret, black, and midnight–” Oh, that’s hags.

Where’s this novel going?

This is one of the best parts of researching a novel: imagining where in the world the story is going to go. In this case, it’ll be somewhere in California, as envisioned on my U.S. Geological Survey maps.

There’s only one problem: I can’t reach my chair without climbing over my desk.

Scathing Amazon reviews: The historian did it

Turns out that historian Orlando Figes’s wife isn’t the anonymous reviewer who trashed his rivals on Amazon after all. Figes is.

Historian admits posting reviews that trashed rivals.

The future of one of Britain’s leading historians was looking increasingly uncertain tonight after he admitted that he was the author of anonymous reviews that praised his own work as “fascinating” and “uplifting” while rubbishing that of his rivals.

“Orlando Figes, one of the stars of contemporary history, had issued a string of legal threats to academic colleagues, literary journals and newspapers that suggested he might have written the reviews posted on Amazon.co.uk.”

When challenged about the reviews, Figes’s lawyer initially denied Figes was the author and threatened legal action. In a later statement, Figes blamed them on his wife, the barrister Stephanie Palmer.

But today Figes, a professor of history at Birkbeck, University of London, admitted “full responsibility” for the posts.

Time for a new scarlet letter. A for Anonymous Amazon trasher.

Because it’s my blog, and I’ll post any pictures I want to

Hey, Husband: I’m still game to go for 50 years of marriage if you are. Or we could agree to stick with it until those 80s hairstyles come back.

Happy anniversary!

Where’s Hitchcock when you need him?

Start the evening celebrating your husband’s return from four months on the road as a trucker; end it like a drunken outtake from The Birds.

Parrots, a fight, and tiny dogs.

Over the incessant barking of half a dozen small dogs, Sgt. Steve Ream couldn’t believe what he saw inside a Beech Street house.

On a bed with the dogs was a woman, with “one large white parrot… standing on her forehead, biting her in the face. There was another smaller bird on her chest.”

This was in addition to as many as 10 cages with other birds, all of them squawking and causing the dogs to bark. The woman appeared to be so intoxicated, Ream said, “that she could not remove the bird off her face.”

When sockpuppets attack

Top historian, accused of trashing rivals in Amazon reviews, says his wife did it.

An extraordinary literary “whodunnit” over the identity of a mystery reviewer who savaged works by some of Britain’s leading academics on the Amazon website has culminated in a top historian admitting that the culprit was, in fact, his wife.

Prof Orlando Figes, 50, an expert on Russia and professor of history at Birkbeck College, London, made the startling revelation in a statement through lawyers following a week of intrigue, suspicion, legal threats and angry email exchanges over postings on the website’s UK book review pages.

The spat began last week when the Cambridge-based academic, Dr Rachel Polonsky, noticed among the many favourable reviews of her book on Russian culture, Molotov’s Magic Lantern, one condemning her efforts as “dense”, “pretentious” and “the sort of book that makes you wonder why it was ever published”.

It ended on late on Friday evening with the surprise unveiling of Figes’s wife, Dr Stephanie Palmer, a senior law lecturer at Cambridge University, barrister, and member of the top human rights specialists, Blackstone Chambers, as the reviewer calling herself “Historian”, and responsible for several anonymous online attacks on the works of her husband’s rivals.

Beware academia. It’s vicious out there.

Post-volcano Panic II: Homeopathic Terrorists

Even more things to panic over.

New Age Terrorists Develop Homeopathic Bomb.

The world has been placed on a heightened security alert following reports that New Age terrorists have harnessed the power of homeopathy for evil. ‘Homeopathic weapons represent a major threat to world peace,’ said President Barack Obama, ‘they might not cause any actual damage but the placebo effect could be quite devastating.’

“The H2O-bomb has been developed by the radical New Age group, The Axis of Aquarius.”

Homeopathic bombs are comprised of 99.9% water but contain the merest trace element of explosive. The solution is then repeatedly diluted so as to leave only the memory of the explosive in the water molecules. According to the laws of homeopathy, the more that the water is diluted, the more powerful the bomb becomes.

‘It was only a matter of time before these people got hold of the material that they needed to make these bombs,’ said former UN weapons inspector, Hans Blix, ‘The world is a much more dangerous place with the advent of these Weapons of Mass Dilution.’

The experts’ biggest fear: “‘Large numbers of people could easily become convinced that they have been killed and hospitals would be unable to cope with the massive influx of the ‘walking suggestible’.’”

Post-volcano Panic, Part I: E-pocalypse looms

Volcano travel chaos has (temporarily at least) abated. But new threats loom.

Online landfills running out of room.

The Internet Apocalypse is at hand. Too many people mistakenly believe that emptying the trash icon on their computer gets rid of deleted e-mails and files.

In reality, the unwanted files go to cyber landfills that are now dangerously close to capacity, experts say.

Unless something changes, the Internet will soon turn into the online equivalent of a backed-up sewer, spewing discarded jpegs, e-mails, spam, Word documents and other detritus into computers worldwide.

“We’re just one or two inspirational chain letters from disaster,” said Caltech professor Bob Nostradamus.

To those people who repeatedly send me prayer e-mails — messages that warn, “To prove that Satan doesn’t have you in his grip, forward this to your entire address book and back to me” — all I can say is: See? See? This is what you get. Not the Rapture, but Internet Rupture.

(Thanks to Rich for the link.)

Kill ‘em

From Parnell Hall, here’s a primer on how to write crime fiction.

It’s gory. And it was shown at the Left Coast Crime gala banquet a few weeks back, before dinner.

On the page or as an appetizer, we mystery folk likes us our blood and guts.

(Via Janet Rudolph.)