The 2010 Edgar Award Nominees

Mystery Writers of America has announced its nominees for the 2010 Edgar Allan Poe Awards, which honor the best in mystery fiction, nonfiction and television published or produced in 2009. The Edgar® Awards will be presented to the winners April 29, 2010 at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York City.

BEST NOVEL
The Missing by Tim Gautreaux (Random House - Alfred A. Knopf)
The Odds by Kathleen George (Minotaur Books)
The Last Child by John Hart (Minotaur Books)
Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death by Charlie Huston (Random House - Ballantine Books)
Nemesis by Jo Nesbø, translated by Don Bartlett (HarperCollins)
A Beautiful Place to Die by Malla Nunn (Simon & Schuster – Atria Books)

BEST FIRST NOVEL BY AN AMERICAN AUTHOR
The Girl She Used to Be by David Cristofano (Grand Central Publishing)
Starvation Lake by Bryan Gruley (Simon & Schuster - Touchstone)
The Weight of Silence by Heather Gudenkauf (MIRA Books)
A Bad Day for Sorry by Sophie Littlefield (Minotaur Books – Thomas Dunne Books)
Black Water Rising by Attica Locke (HarperCollins)
In the Shadow of Gotham by Stefanie Pintoff (Minotaur Books)

BEST PAPERBACK ORIGINAL
Bury Me Deep by Megan Abbott (Simon & Schuster)
Havana Lunar by Robert Arellano (Akashic Books)
The Lord God Bird by Russell Hill (Pleasure Boat Studio – Caravel Books)
Body Blows by Marc Strange (Dundurn Press – Castle Street Mysteries)
The Herring-Seller’s Apprentice by L.C. Tyler (Felony & Mayhem Press)

BEST FACT CRIME
Columbine by Dave Cullen (Hachette Book Group - Twelve)
Go Down Together: The True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde by Jeff Guinn (Simon & Schuster)
The Fence: A Police Cover-Up Along Boston’s Racial Divide by Dick Lehr (HarperCollins)
Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art by Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo (The Penguin Press)
Vanished Smile: The Mysterious Theft of Mona Lisa by R.A. Scotti (Random House - Alfred A. Knopf)

BEST CRITICAL/BIOGRAPHICAL
Talking About Detective Fiction by P.D. James (Random House - Alfred A. Knopf)
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)
Haunted Heart: The Life and Times of Stephen King by Lisa Rogak (Thomas Dunne Books)
The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith by Joan Schenkar (St. Martin’s Press)
The Stephen King Illustrated Companion by Bev Vincent (Fall River Press)

BEST SHORT STORY
"Last Fair Deal Gone Down" – Crossroad Blues by Ace Atkins (Busted Flush Press)
"Femme Sole" – Boston Noir by Dana Cameron (Akashic Books)
"Digby, Attorney at Law" – Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine by Jim Fusilli (Dell Magazines)
"Animal Rescue" – Boston Noir by Dennis Lehane (Akashic Books
"Amapola" – Phoenix Noir by Luis Alberto Urrea (Akashic Books)

BEST JUVENILE
The Case of the Case of Mistaken Identity by Mac Barnett (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers)
The Red Blazer Girls: The Ring of Rocamadour by Michael D. Beil (Random House Children’s Books – Alfred A. Knopf)
Closed for the Season by Mary Downing Hahn (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Children’s Books)
Creepy Crawly Crime by Aaron Reynolds (Henry Holt Books for Young Readers)
The Case of the Cryptic Crinoline by Nancy Springer (Penguin Young Readers Group – Philomel Books)

BEST YOUNG ADULT
Reality Check by Peter Abrahams (HarperCollins Children’s Books – HarperTeen)
If the Witness Lied by Caroline B. Cooney (Random House Children’s Books – Delacorte Press)
The Morgue and Me by John C. Ford (Penguin Young Readers Group – Viking Children’s Books)
Petronella Saves Nearly Everyone by Dene Low (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Children’s Books)
Shadowed Summer by Saundra Mitchell (Random House Children’s Books – Delacorte Press)

BEST TELEVISION EPISODE TELEPLAY
“Place of Execution,” Teleplay by Patrick Harbinson (PBS/WGBH Boston)
“Strike Three” – The Closer, Teleplay by Steven Kane (Warner Bros TV for TNT)
“Look What He Dug Up This Time” – Damages, Teleplay by Todd A. Kessler, Glenn Kessler & Daniel Zelman (FX Networks)
“Grilled” – Breaking Bad, Teleplay by George Mastras (AMC/Sony)
“Living the Dream” – Dexter, Teleplay by Clyde Phillips (Showtime)

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)

THE SIMON & SCHUSTER - MARY HIGGINS CLARK AWARD
Awakening by S.J. Bolton (Minotaur Books)
Cat Sitter on a Hot Tin Roof by Blaize Clement (Minotaur Books)
Never Tell a Lie by Hallie Ephron (HarperCollins – William Morrow)
Lethal Vintage by Nadia Gordon (Chronicle Books)
Dial H for Hitchcock by Susan Kandel (HarperCollins)

It's a steal

There have been a number of articles recently on stolen books...that is, the books people steal from bookstores. I'm not sure why people steal anything, and I'm more unsure as to why anyone would steal a book. Books, at least to this bookseller, are sacred and should never be stolen, abused, burned or even have their corners bent to mark a page -- that is what a bookmark is for.

Book stealers are usually book resellers, usually on a street corner (if in a large metro area), a flea market or to an unscrupulous bookstore that buys stolen merchandise. Over the past 40 years, I've worked in bookstores only to learn that no book is impossible to heist. A pile of Herman Wouk's "War and Remembrance" took a hike one afternoon with a fellow who simply put his raincoat around a stack and walked out of one Manhattan store. We found him hawking them two blocks away for $2 a pop. I have also handed a customer an expensive book, turned my back for a moment and ... poof!...he was gone; I caught up with him a couple minutes ... and blocks ... later.

An article in the London Times earlier this year had a bookseller claiming that London A-Z was the most stolen book in the world. Maybe for him, or for his time selling books, but I'd like to see proof. Maybe it only holds true if you sell books in London, but I'd think it would be the Harry Potter books in England.

I put the whole book-stealing thing on '60s radical Abbie Hoffman who titled his tome Steal This Book, thereby encouraging rampant bibliocrime.

Of course, if one were to steal a book you'd think it would be something rare and valuable -- some first edition of some antique manuscript that was worth a fortune. But in my experience, the most-often pilfered book is the Holy Bible (King James version). Whether it has been from a small independent or a large chain store, it always seems that the most taken is the (supposedly) most sacred.

One wonders whether the people who steal bibles actually get around to reading them,. They might want to check out Exodus 20: 2-17. There are a bunch of Thou Shall Nots they should probably become acquainted with.

Fen for yourself

It seems that everybody wants to know what the latest and greatest mystery books are...and here I sit reading Edmund Crispin's The Moving Toyshop, the third book in the Gervase Fen series. While I rave that The Girl Who Played With Fire is the most exciting book of the year, I have to admit that Crispin's 1946 entertainment remains a corker.

While the mystery (about a poet who stumbles upon a body in a toy shop only to return with the police to discover the body gone and the toy shop nonexistent) is clever enough (think Bryant and May at its most droll), it is decidedly an entertainment, one in which Crispin even breaks the "fourth wall" -- while locked in a closet, Fen speculates on what title Crispin will give this new adventure and comes up with several possibilities that place him in an heroic light.

Crispin, who wrote his first Fen mystery while he was still an undergraduate at Oxford, is so funny and so fey that one expects his novels to offer guest appearances by Bertie Wooster and his valet Jeeves. While he was a composer (he did music for the Carry On series, written under his real name Bruce Montgomery), book editor and crime fiction reviewer for the Sunday Times, it is for the Fen books that he is most remembered.

There are a total of nine delightful Gervase Fen novels and several dozen short stories. Felony and Mayhem Press has reissued six in the series so far, but The Moving Toyshop remains among the missing. Still, you can find it in some shops who have imported it (it is published by Vintage, a British imprint of Random House). It may not be a Christmas story but it certainly is a holiday treat.

Change of habit

Once we dismiss the unfortunate cover of this week's Publisher's Weekly -- Afro Picks!, which features an African-American model wearing a forest of afro picks displaying Black Power fists (o, my) -- and head inside the issue, it turns out that there is some good news for book lovers.

When I say "book lovers," I mean those people who actually have a fondness for real books with paper pages...i.e., traditional bound books, not plastic screens tailored to the tactile impaired. As reported in PW, Simon and Schuster has joined a growing number of publishers who are questioning the logic of publishing titles as books and e-books simultaneously.

Simon will delay several dozen e-book titles to give the paper-and-print variety some time on the shelves. HarperCollins and Hachette Book Group are also toying with different ways to save traditional printing from the fangs of discounted e-books.

While some are quoted in the article as saying that this kind of delay is what hurt the film industry, you don't see movies like Avatar or Blind Sided coming out on video the week they hit the big screen. Those who want to see the film immediately must go to a movie theater; others wait the three to six months before they can buy it (or rent it) from a video store.

Publishers need to protect their books, their authors and the industry. My suggestion to publishers: If you are going to retail an e-book for under $10, wait until it is published in mass market paperback form for under $10. Instead of caving in to the Nook and the Kindle, do the smart thing before people start copying book titles as easily as they share music.

Tempest in a 'Teaglass'

Bibliophiles love mysteries, so what better mystery could there be than the tale of bibliophiles plunged into murder and romance? The Broken Teaglass is a wonderful find -- a literary mystery. Among the dusty files of a dictionary publishing house, editors pore over new entries and investigate meaning and origin. But it looks as if someone has left a cache of coded clues to an unsolved murder.

Author Emily Arsenault explores words and how we define ourselves, as coworkers Billy Webb and Mona Minot puzzle out a mystery of wit and intelligence.

And luckily, author Arensault recently dropped by to sign copies for the store.

Clash of the Titans

Wal-Mart and Amazon have declared war by offering books for sale well below wholesale prices. You'd think that the small retail store would be wise to duck for cover.

Looking for the latest John Grisham book (Ford County, out Nov. 3)? The book retails for $24 and you can pre-order it online from both companies for a paltry $9. Since the average mom-and-pop bookstore pays approximately $15 for the same book (plus shipping), they could be left out in the cold. The forthcoming James Patterson I, Alex Cross book priced at $27.99 is available at the same $9 rate. And Stephen King's Under The Dome is an even better deal: $35 retail, $9 online at Wal-Mart and Amazon (a savings of 75 percent).

As an independent bookseller, I probably shouldn't be letting people know where they can get these book deals. But the fact is that this book fire sale won't effect our store much because these are not authors who sell well in an independent store. These are authors whose books are sold by the truckload in supermarkets and drug stores, Wal-Marts and Costcos...and Barnes & Nobles and Borders (who will probably feel the pinch in this clash of the titans). Most likely, I will sell only one or two John Grisham books while the Stephen King book may or may not sell at all. I don't even bother to buy James Patterson books for our shop; he may be a brand name writer but his sales do little or nothing for an independent shop like ours, unless he shows up to do a book signing.

November is a difficult month for many book stores and both Amazon and Wal-Mart probably feel the pinch too, so maybe they've decided to do "loss leaders" to get people onto their web sites and, while they are shopping for their book bargains, possibly buy more. It will be interesting to see how long this price cutting lasts (can Amazon continue to sell books below the price of a Kindle download that, many suspect, is well below their costs already?).

These mass discounts may be good for the bottom line, but they cheapen both the book publishers and the authors they publish. Still, the giants will do what they do best: sell popular fiction, widgets or cans of peas by the caseload. Those of us who love books will continue to look for talented new authors and promote them by word-of-mouth one at a time.

Wish us luck.

Gunther goes gunning

Lovers of police procedurals will find much to enjoy in Archer Mayor's The Price of Malice, the 20th investigation headed by Joe Gunther of the Vermont Bureau of Investigation.

After a man is found brutally murdered in Brattleboro, Vermont, the killer remains at large. But it soon develops that the murdered man is a suspected child predator tangled in a network of an extended family living in a local trailer park. Any member of the clan would have had the opportunity to kill him, and, as he was involved with both the mother and her 12-year-old daughter, reason to commit the murder. At the same time, Gunther has learned that his girlfriend Lyn’s fisherman father and brother, believed lost at sea off the coast of Maine, might have actually been murdered.

Lyn returns to Maine to investigate while Gunther periodically puts his on-going murder investigation on hold—irritating his colleagues and angering his bosses —to go and help Lyn in Maine. Torn between his conscience and his heart, a murder investigation and a personal search for the truth, Gunther finds that betrayal and loyalty are often a matter of viewpoint. This is another fine entry into the series, bringing to the fore some of the secondary characters who have been a part of Joe's career over the years. Fans of the irascible Willy Kunkle will be especially pleased, because whenever Willy's on the case the dialogue between him and his associates catches fire.

Basically, The Price of Malice offers solid detective work written by one of the best in the business.