Murder in the Court: Ngaio winner revealed

THE NGAIO MARSH AWARD, in association with WORD Christchurch and The Press, is pleased to reveal that whodunit and who-won-it will be announced at a great event at the Court Theatre on 4 October.

“I’m thrilled that the event will be held at the Court Theatre this year,” says Judging Convenor Craig Sisterson, “both as a nod to Dame Ngaio’s own passion for the stage, and because the Court Jesters were scheduled to perform at our inaugural event in 2010, before the Christchurch earthquakes intervened.”

The event on Sunday 4 October begins at 5.00pm and will include a chance to have a drink and mingle with the finalists and an improvised murder mystery, followed by actors reading from each novel:

FIVE MINUTES ALONE by Paul Cleave (Penguin NZ)

THE PETTICOAT MEN by Barbara Ewing (Head of Zeus)

SWIMMING IN THE DARK by Paddy Richardson (Upstart Press)

THE CHILDREN’S POND by Tina Shaw (Pointer Press)

FALLOUT by Paul Thomas (Upstart Press)

“Rachael King and her WORD Christchurch team have put together a really terrific evening to honour this year’s finalists,” says Sisterson. “We’re all curious to see who’ll win from amongst this superb array of New Zealand writing talent; diverse books melding page-turning storytelling with deeper societal issues. I understand it’s been a cliffhanger decision for our international judging panel of crime fiction experts.”

The Ngaio Marsh Award is made annually for the best crime, mystery, or thriller novel written by a New Zealand citizen or resident. This year’s winner will receive the Ngaio Marsh Award trophy, a set of Dame Ngaio’s novels courtesy of her publisher HarperCollins, and a cash prize provided by WORD Christchurch.

WORD Christchurch will also be giving away a set of the finalists’ novels to an attendee on the night.

For more information and ticketing, contact WORD Christchurch at admin@wordchristchurch.co.nz

For more on the Ngaio Marsh Award, go to www.facebook.com/NgaioMarshAward, follow on Twitter @ngaiomarshaward, or contact the Judging Convenor directly: craigsisterson@hotmail.com

Competition - Win a complete signed set of the Ngaio Marsh Award short listed books

Readers from around the world have the opportunity to win personally autographed copies of this year's Ngaio Marsh Award finalists, as the "Reading Kiwi Crime" competition kicks off for 2015. 

Going into the draw to win is simple: all you need to do is take a picture of yourself reading any New Zealand crime, mystery, or thriller title - from old classics like Ngaio Marsh, Fergus Hume, Elizabeth Messenger and Laurie Mantell, to the latest from award winners like Paul Cleave, Paul Thomas, and Neil Cross. Then share it with the Award organisers by:

1.              Tweeting the pic and tagging @ngaiomarshaward; OR

2.              Posting the pic to the Ngaio Marsh Award Facebook page; OR

3.              Emailing the pic to ngaiomarshaward@gmail.com. 

If you follow the Award's twitter account or like the Facebook page, you'll get a bonus entry in the draw. 

Just to clarify: the book in your photo doesn't have to be set in New Zealand, just written by an author connected to New Zealand (citizen, resident, grew up here, etc). If you're scratching your head for choices, here's a long list of possibilities.

So grab something from your shelf or hit your local bookstore or library, and get snapping. 

The winner will be drawn on 4 October when the winner of the 2015 Ngaio Marsh Award is announced.

Ngaio Marsh Award Short List

FIVE OUTSTANDING novels full of mystery and intrigue have been announced as the shortlist for the 2015 Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel, which will be presented at an event held in association with WORD Christchurch in late September.

“The five books on this year’s shortlist are a superb showcase of New Zealand writing talent,” says Judging Convenor Craig Sisterson. “A few years ago it was common to question the quality of crime writing in this country, but these authors clearly demonstrate that our tales and our writers stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the best in the world. The shortlist contains a diverse range of styles and stories, but each book melds page-turning entertainment with an undercurrent of deeper issues that go the very heart of our communities and society.”

After much deliberation, the international judging panel has selected the following five finalists:

         FIVE MINUTES ALONE by Paul Cleave (Penguin NZ)

         THE PETTICOAT MEN by Barbara Ewing (Head of Zeus)

         SWIMMING IN THE DARK by Paddy Richardson (Upstart Press)

         THE CHILDREN’S POND by Tina Shaw (Pointer Press)

         FALLOUT by Paul Thomas (Upstart Press)

The judges praised Cleave’s FIVE MINUTES ALONE as “gritty and thoroughly absorbing”, a “one-sitting” novel that “evokes complex feelings regarding retribution and morality”. Ewing’s THE PETTICOAT MEN is “an immaculately researched” take on a real-life 1870s event that is “spirited, full of strong characters” and “a joy to read”.  The panel hailed SWIMMING IN THE DARK as “an elegantly delivered, disturbing, and ultimately very human tale” that showcased Richardson’s talent for “damaged characters and tackling grey areas”. Tina Shaw authors a “mesmerising” character study in THE CHILDREN’S POND, using deft and spare language to craft a tale with a sublime sense of both place and menace that is “a delight to read”. Paul Thomas’s FALLOUT is “compelling and character-rich”, a “superb continuation” of the Ihaka series; “excellent writing… funny, but also serious.”

The Ngaio Marsh Award is made annually for the best crime, mystery, or thriller novel written by a New Zealand citizen or resident. This year’s winner will receive the Ngaio Marsh Award trophy, a set of Dame Ngaio’s novels courtesy of her publisher HarperCollins, and a cash prize provided by WORD Christchurch.  

The Award’s namesake, Dame Ngaio Marsh, was a Christchurch mystery writer and theatre director renowned worldwide as one of the four “Queens of Crime” of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. More than thirty years after her death her books remain in print and beloved by many generations of readers. The Ngaio Marsh Award was established in 2010 with the blessing of Dame Ngaio’s closest living relative, John Dacres-Manning.

And Then There Were Nine!

THREE debut novelists and two established authors dipping their creative pens in the crime and mystery well for the first time help bring a fresh look to the longlist for the 2015 Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel, revealed today. “It is fantastic to see more and more talented New Zealand writers bringing their unique voices, perspectives, and interests to one of the world’s most popular storytelling genres,” said Judging Convenor Craig Sisterson. “Crime fiction is a broad church nowadays, and this year’s excellent longlist illustrates that well. It will be very interesting to see which of these books the judges prefer.” The nine longlisted titles are:

DROWNING CITY by Ben Atkins (Random House)

FIVE MINUTES ALONE by Paul Cleave (Atria)

DATABYTE by Cat Connor (Rebel ePublishers)

THE PETTICOAT MEN by Barbara Ewing (Head of Zeus)

A HISTORY OF CRIME: THE SOUTHERN DOUBLE-CROSS by Dinah Holman (Ravensbourne Books)

TRILEMMA by Jennifer Mortimer (Oceanview Publishing)

SWIMMING IN THE DARK by Paddy Richardson (Upstart Press)

THE CHILDREN’S POND by Tina Shaw (Pointer Press)

FALLOUT by Paul Thomas (Upstart Press)

The judging panel (crime fiction experts from New Zealand, Australia, the United States, United Kingdom and Iceland) will announce the finalists in May. The winner will be revealed at a special event held later this year in association with WORD Christchurch, which has supported the Award since its establishment in 2010.

For more information, please contact: Craig Sisterson, Judging Convenor: ngaiomarshaward@gmail.com

Books to look forward to from Bitter Lemon Press

Tito Ihaka, the unkempt, overweight Maori cop was demoted to Sergeant due to insubordination and pigheadedness. He investigates the unsolved killing of 17 year old girl at an election night party in a ritzy villa near Auckland. Ihaka is also embroiled in a very personal mystery. A freelance journalist has stumbled across information that Ihaka's father Jimmy, a trade union firebrand and renegade Marxist, didn't die of natural causes. The stories weave themselves into an exciting climax in an atmosphere of political manoeuvring and intrigue surrounding the USA's confrontation with New Zealand over its anti-nuclear stance. Fallout is by Paul Thomas and is due to be published in March 2015.

Tin Sky is by Ben Pastor and is due to be published in April 2015.  Ukraine, 1943. Having barely escaped the inferno of Stalingrad, Major Martin Bora is still serving on the Russian front as a German counterintelligence officer. At a time when weariness, disillusionment, and battle fatigue are a soldier's daily fare, Bora seems to be one of the few whose sanity is not marred by the horrors of war. Two Russian generals in his custody die within twenty-four hours of each other. Everything appears to exclude the likelihood of foul play, but Bora begins an investigation, a stubborn attempt to solve a mystery that will come much too close for comfort.

The novel is set in the Pantanal,the Brazilian lowlands bordering Bolivia. One bright Sunday on the banks of the Paraguay River, the narrator witnesses the fatal crash of a small ‘plane. He finds a kilo of cocaine in the dead pilot's backpack which he pockets . Thus begins a long slide into corruption. When the crash site is located several days later, the pilot's body is missing. Our hero gets involved in a busted cocaine deal and ends up owing a Bolivian drug gang so much money that blackmailing the wealthy family of the dead pilot seems to be the only way out. The family secretly agrees to pay serious money to recover the body of their son. Our hero doesn't have the pilot's body so someone else's will do. Or so he thinks.  The Body Snatcher is by Patricia Mello and is due to be published in June 2015.

Behind God’s Back is by Harri Nykanen and s due to be published in January 2015. There are two Jewish cops in all of Helsinki. One of them, Ariel Kafka, a lieutenant in the Violent Crime Unit, identifies himself as a policeman first, then a Finn, and lastly a Jew. Kafka is a religiously non-observant 40-something bachelor who is such a stubborn, dedicated policeman that he's willing to risk his career to get an answer. Murky circumstances surround his investigation of a Jewish businessman's murder. Neo-Nazi violence, intergenerational intrigue, shady loans – predictable lines of investigation lead to unpredictable culprits. But a second killing strikes closer to home, and the Finnish Security Police come knocking. The tentacles of Israeli politics and Mossad reach surprisingly far, once again wrapping Kafka in their sticky embrace. 

Big Down Under!

Crime fans in New Zealand are eagerly awaiting the new Paul Thomas novel, Fallout, which will feature the maverick Maori detective Tito Ihaka.  The forthcoming New Zealand edition comes with a front cover recommendation from Ian Rankin.  But even more interesting is the back cover endorsement which records that Thomas’ previous Ihaka book, Death on Demand, was Shots’ 2013 Crime Novel of the Year as judged by “UK Crime Fiction Guru Mike Ripley.

 Tito Ihaka, the unkempt, overweight Maori cop was demoted to Sergeant due to insubordination and pig-headedness.  He investigates the unsolved killing of 17-year-old girl at an election night party in a ritzy villa near Auckland.  Ihaka is also embroiled in a very personal mystery.  A freelance journalist has stumbled across information that Ihaka's father Jimmy, a trade union firebrand and renegade Marxist, didn't die of natural causes.  The stories weave themselves into an exciting climax in an atmosphere of political manoeuvring and intrigue surrounding the USA's confrontation with New Zealand over its anti-nuclear stance.

SHOTS of the Year 2013

The annual Shots of the Year Awards selected by Shots Magazine’s Mike Ripley are announced in the December edition of his Getting Away With Murder column, and are as follows:

 Crime Shot of the Year: the zany, frantic and utterly enthralling Death On Demand by Paul Thomas [Bitter Lemon Press] which saw the return of maverick Maori detective Tito Ihaka and showed that the Godfather of crime writing in New Zealand is back with a vengeance.

Thriller Shot of the Year: Tatiana by Martin Cruz Smith [Simon & Schuster]. Whistle-blowing journalists, oligarchs, corrupt policemen and an outrageous political scam in contemporary Russia with, in Arkady Renko, one of the great fictional heroes of the last thirty years.

Historical Shot of the Year: This was the closest one to call with some seriously good historical thrillers from D. J. Taylor, Sam Eastland and John Lawton, but the title goes to Dead Man’s Land by Rob Ryan [Simon & Schuster] which gloriously dared to put Dr Watson (and an off-stage Sherlock Holmes) on the Western Front during WWI in an engaging mystery which also says much about the role and status of women at the time. Ryan’s tour-de-force narrowly pipped Andrew Taylor’s Scent of Death set, intriguingly, in colonial New York.

Comic Shot of the Year: Bad Monkey by Carl Hiaasen [Sphere]. After a few quiet years by his standards, Hiaasen has recently reasserted himself as the crime king of belly laughs, most of them in deliciously bad taste. With Bad Monkey he is back on top form even if the title character (a veteran animal actor from the Pirates of the Caribbean movies) hardly gets a look in.

Debut Shot of the Year: City of Blood by M.D. Villiers [Harvill Secker]. A quite stunning first novel but visiting the parts of Johannesburg described here without a heavily-armed escort is not recommended. Martie de Villiers has created a formidable detective duo (one white, one Zulu) and enhanced South Africa’s growing reputation as a major player on the international crime writing scene.

Shot in Translation: (from the Italian) Everyone in their Place by Maurizio de Giovanni [Europa]. Fascinating mix of Christie-like whodunit and spooky thriller set in 1931 Naples. Police detectives Ricciardi (who has a sixth sense and ‘sees dead people’) and the weight-conscious Maione make a great team, contending with a summer heat-wave, Fascist politics, the attractions of several females, the aristocracy, a curious OVRA (Mussolini’s Gestapo) agent and a society murder.

Reissue Shot of 2013: Blue Octavo by John Blackburn [Valancourt]. Great to see this 1963 mystery set in the world of antiquarian book dealers back in print. A disgracefully-forgotten author in his native Britain, Blackburn’s reputation is thankfully being rescued by enthusiastic American fans.