This is indeed the season of awards for mystery fiction.
Nominations have been announced for the Edgars, the Agatha, the L.A. Times Book Prize (all of which you can read about on this blog). Anyone attending the Indianapolis Bouchercon probably has already received a nomination ballot.
Left Coast Crime recently announced its winners.
And we – well I — certainly can’t let these winners just take their prize and leave.
Comments must be made.
First, I want to commend the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association (IMBA) for choosing Sean Chercover’s Trigger City as the winner of its 2009 Dilys Award.
To be truthful, I am happy for any author who wins this prize.
Independent mystery bookstore owners are the unsung heroes of the genre.
They, more so than chain stores or online sites, know their customers. They are well versed in the genre and keep their customers buying books and coming back for more.
Every author owes these stores a ton of gratitude. Especially when it seems that there are fewer of these wonderful stores each year.
So back to Sean.
I interviewed him for Mystery Scene’s Holiday Issue. (That’s the one with Donna Andrews on the cover; No. 107, 2008 if you want to order it.)
Sean is one of the genre’s up and coming authors. His 2007 debut Big City, Bad Blood has won the Shamus and the Gumshoe Award, was nominated for a slew of other awards and made several best of the year lists. (That includes the annual list I do for the Sun-Sentinel.)
Trigger City was named a Killer Book by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association, an alternate selection by several book clubs and earned just as many positive reviews as his first. It also made several best of the year lists, again, mine included.
During our interview, Sean discussed the private eye novel.
Here is an excerpt from the article that ran in Mystery Scene:
“In his novels, Chercover took the hard-boiled route with a nod to the old-fashioned gumshoe but with a modern spin. Series character Ray Dudgeon is a disillusioned newspaper reporter-turned-private detective. Nearing 40, Dudgeon keeps a gun and a bottle in his bottom drawer with his name etched in gold on the frosted window outside his seedy office.
“Ray is cynical, but he also is a wounded idealist. He wants officials to be honest but he’s not surprised when they turn out to be corrupt,” said Chercover.
While Chercover pays homage to the clichéd p.i., the author avoids stereotypes by slowing revealing Dudgeon’s backstory that includes his mother’s suicide.
“The p.i. novels I love are those in which each of the characters all seem very different from each other. Ray isn’t as self-destructive as [Ken Bruen’s] Jack Taylor. Ray doesn’t understand himself as well as [Lawrence Block’s] Scudder does himself but it took a long time for Scudder to get where he is. Characters who change and grow are appealing. I wanted my character to be affected by the changes he goes through.”
Sean has good company with the Dilys Award.
Previous winners include William Kent Kruger, Thunder Bay; Louise Penny, Still Life; Colin Cotterill, Thirty-Three Teeth; Jeffrey Lindsay, Darkly Dreaming Dexter; Jasper Fforde, Lost in a Good Book; Julia Spencer-Fleming, In the Bleak Midwinter; Dennis Lehane, Mystic River; Val McDermid, A Place of Execution; Robert Crais, L.A. Requiem.
