The 2021 Shamus Award Finalists

 

The finalists for the 2021 Shamus Awards, for private eye novels and short stories first published in the United States in 2020, have just been announced by Gay Toltl Kinman, Chairperson for the Shamus Awards.

BEST PI HARDCOVER

What You Don’t See by Tracy Clark (Kensington)

Do No Harm by Max Allan Collins Tor Forge)

Blind Vigil by Matt Coyle (Oceanview)

House on Fire by Joseph Finder (Dutton)

And Now She’s Gone by Rachel Howzell Hall (Tor Forge)

BEST ORIGINAL PI PAPERBACK

Farewell Las Vegas by Grant Bywaters (Wild Rose Press)

All Kinds of Ugly by Ralph Dennis Brash Books)

Brittle Karma by Richard Helms (Black Arch Books)

Remember My Face by John Lantigua (Arte Publico)

Damaged Goods by Debbi Mack (Renegade Pressr)

BEST PI SHORT STORY

“A Dreamboat Gambol” by O’Neil De Noux in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine

“Mustang Sally” by John M. Floyd in Black Cat Mystery Magazine

“Setting the Pick” by April Kelly in Mystery Weekly Magazine

“Show and Zeller” by Gordon Linzer in Black Cat Mystery Magazine

“Nashua River Floater” by Tom MacDonald in Coast to Coast Noir

BEST FIRST PI NOVEL

Squatter’s Rights by Kevin R. Doyle (Camel Press)

Derailed by Mary Keliikoa (Epicenter Press)

I Know Where You Sleep by Alan Orloff (Down & Out Books)

The Missing American by Kwei Quartey ( Soho)

Winter Counts by David Heska Wanbli Weiden ( Ecco)

A Shots Magazine Exclusive: Coming this weekend

Before 2019 petered out (and we embraced the two-faces of Janus) with 2020 arriving; many of us were fortunate to have grabbed a copy of REAP THE WHIRLWIND, published by The Crime and Mystery Club.

This ‘different’ book helped some of us cope as the Earth passed the Sun on another lap of the Solar System, taking us back to 1990s London. It’s the return to print of the adventures [and misadventures] of the South London Private Investigator, Nick Sharman created and penned by Mark Timlin.

I wrote in December [2019] –

“An unexpected Christmas gift arrives for Crime Fiction readers, for Mark Timlin’s signature detective Nick Sharman returns to the page when we all thought he was gone into the memories of days now passed. This new book proves us wrong, though it is actually a collection of five short stories, and a novella that gives this book its title.

It’s been awhile since we last met up with the troubled Sarf-London private-eye; though set in those days when Nick Sharman bumbled along in the 1990s, this new book is surprisingly fresh. Naturally there is a nostalgic appeal for readers familiar with Mark Timlin’s voice, that terse urgency of Sharman’s first-person narrative. There is a broader appeal to those yet to experience the world through those amoral eyes, and of that voice.”

Read the full review HERE

And our subsequent chat which I transcribed as an interview which became a feature, and is archived HERE

Mark and his partner, the renowned book publicist Lucy Ramsey have long since left not only London, but England. It’s been a little while since I last visited them, which I recorded HERE which also acts as background to the literary work of the author.

During a telephone call last week (as both Mark and I are awake before dawn), I was delighted to learn that Mark has started writing again, and will be reviewing books for Shots Magazine. Writing and Reading keeps the mind lubricated [away from despair] as we age, which for some, is as disgracefully as we’d lived when we were young. For good mental health, little beats reading novels in these days fuelled with Anxiety, Depression and the advent of the streaming TV services. This link HERE from the BBC concurs.

Over our chat, I told him how much I enjoyed the stories in REAP THE WHIRLWIND; the recollection of seeing the world through Nick Sharman’s eyes again. I encouraged him to keep on writing, as all writers tell each other [….keep going…keep going…..] in those ours before dawn – where imagination and good coffee [and perhaps pets] are our only friends.

He also told me about a story he penned during the Christmas Holiday. A festive look back at 1990s from the eyes of Nick Sharman, entitled “Merry Christmas, Baby”.

I asked rather cheekily, if I could have a read? Which he agreed to, and emailed it over. I loved it, and as Christmas 2019 had just passed and the tale being of a seasonal nature – I hinted that he’d have difficulty placing it - until the tail-end of this year [for inclusion in a Crime Magazine or a Festive Crime Collection].

Mark agreed to it being serialised at Shots Magazine. So, after editing, it will be presented here shortly on the Blog, split into two parts.

Stay Tuned, it’s a late Christmas gift written in the last Month of 2019 by Mark Timlin, but set in 1990s London for the readers of Shots Magazine.

Those with long memories of Mark Timlin’s amoral stories, will recall that Nick Sharman was played by a young Clive Owen on a mid-1990’s TV crime show [now available on DVD and BluRay]. Viewing it, like reading Nick Sharman leaves a dent, a scar in the mind. For me, Clive Owen will always be the face and voice of Nick Sharman.

I recall watching Spike Lee’s extraordinary 2006 Heist Thriller [written by Russell Gewirtz], a film that remains one of my all-time favourite crime-thrillers.

The opening monologue read by Clive Owen, over the opening credits, for my money, was just so Nick Sharman [perhaps with a little elocution] -

My name is Dalton Russell.

Pay strict attention to what I say because I choose my words carefully and never repeat myself.

I have told you my name, and that's the who.

The where can most readily be described as a prison cell. But there's a vast difference between being stuck in a tiny cell and being imprisoned.

The what is easy. Recently, I planned and set in motion events to execute the perfect bank robbery.

That's also the when.

As for the why, beyond the obvious financial motivation, it's exceedingly simple. Because I can.

Which leaves us only with the how. And therein, as the Bard would tell us, lies the rub.

At film’s opening credit sequence, Clive Owen’s monologue bled into a reworking of A.R. Rahman's "Chaiyya Chaiyya" song, featuring Panjabi MC's added rap lyrics about people of different backgrounds coming together in order to survive. 

People working together, and an appreciation of diversity is an ethos of mine, and of many other people; including the fictional character of Nick Sharman, who survives his misadventures with his own eclectic entourage (like the amusingly named police detective Jack Robber), with an ethos the Bard would describe in Hamlet as, “ therein lies the rub”.

As you will see in “Merry Christmas, Baby” published shortly and exclusively at Shots Blog in two parts over the weekend

For more information about the Mysterious Mark Timlin, click this link HERE and scroll baby, scroll.

More information about Mark Timlin as well as his work published by No Exit Press is available HERE

More information about Mark Timlin’s REAP THE WHIRLWIND including purchase from The Crime and Mystery Club is available HERE

More information about the character, Nick Sharman from Thrilling Detective Click HERE

More information about the Sharman TV series [available on DVD / Blueray] Click HERE and HERE

And an additional treat, we can finally reveal that Mark Timlin will be making his first public appearance [in well over a decade], with Lucy Ramsey at the 2020 Crimefest Convention in Bristol in a special event, details to be forthcoming when Donna Moore and Adrian Muller [with their team] unfurl the full program.

More information about registering from Crimefest 2020, CLICK HERE and we hope to see you there June 4^th to 7^th in Bristol, England, especially seated in the bar just like Nick Sharman, talking about our lives in books, writing and reading - and laughing loudly and frequently. 

Graphics © 2020 No Exit Press © 2019 The Crime and Mystery Club and © 1996 World Productions © 2020 Ali Karim and © 2020 Shots Magazine.

Walking a Tightrope in Stilettos – The PI’s lot. by Marnie Riches

In her recent review of Tightrope, fellow author, Sarah Rhiannon Ward observed that my new thriller, featuring Private Investigator, Beverley Saunders, put her in mind of Sara Paretsky’s V. I. Warshawski novels. How amazing to be mentioned in the same breath as Paretsky! I was deeply flattered, I can tell you, especially since this debut outing for the fearless but flawed Bev is the first time I have told a story with a PI at the helm. 

Crime-thrillers with private sleuths or non-police officers as the main protagonists are among the most successful in the world. Patricia Cornwell has millions of fans for her Dr. Kay Scarpetta series, featuring a chief medical examiner. Elly Griffiths is doing brilliantly well with her forensic archaeologist, Dr. Ruth Galloway. My own criminologist heroine, Dr. George McKenzie (in my The Girl Who… series, set in South East London and Amsterdam) has done rather well with readers too. But back to the humble independent sleuth! In addition to Paretsky and Sue Grafton, JK Rowling has had incredible success as Robert Galbraith, writing about her PI, Cormoran Strike. On the small screen as well, the private gumshoe has captured imaginations across the globe. In the 80s, we adored Magnum PI with Tom Selleck. Back in the 1990s, the great British TV-watching public tuned in to get their weekly fix of Hetty Wainthropp Investigates…for four series! And yet, there certainly isn’t currently a proliferation of super-successful PIs in the broad church that is the British crime -fiction genre. They’re massively outnumbered by cops!

As I write this piece for Shots readers, I do have to ask why there is this disproportionate dominance of coppers in crime-fiction, when amateur or non-police sleuths have so much more freedom to investigate. As an author, you get far more mileage from a PI who plays fast and loose with the law than from a detective who is bound by hierarchy, protocol and legal idiosyncrasies. Bev Saunders turned out to be a tremendously fun protagonist for me. Initially, she starts digging for dirt on behalf of her client, Angela Fitzwilliam – the battered wife of Shadow Cabinet Minister, Jerry Fitzwilliam. On the surface, Angie has it all. She’s a wealthy, pampered housewife, living in Hale, Cheshire, where footballers rub shoulders with old money and millionaire entrepreneurs. But scratch the surface and Angie’s world is falling apart, thanks to her bullying, lying husband who puts on a convincing show for the media. 

As Bev is a recent divorcée herself, she’s persuaded to take on Angie’s plight and find strong evidence of grounds for divorce that will insure Angela against Jerry’s threat to deny her custody of or even access to their children and to withhold all her marital wealth. This is a powerful man who likes to play dirty, but because Bev is a lone wolf – apart from help in digital matters that she gets from her therapy-group friend and technology-whizz, Doc – Bev can play dirty too. By catfishing the Cabinet Minister and trying to honey-trap him, she becomes embroiled in a terrifying cat-and-mouse chase, where eventually, she is the one being investigated, nay, stalked. Unlike a detective, Bev Saunders is able to go the extra mile without worrying that she’ll be disciplined by a superior. In fact, she’s so naïve to the risks of the job, the pay is so poor and the stakes – if she fails in her self-employed venture – are personally so high, that Bev’s prepared to walk a very perilous tightrope indeed if she’s to bring her case to a satisfactory conclusion. She’s willing to hack, lie and literally flirt her way to the truth, allowing me to take the reader on a very gritty, at times seedy and thrilling journey.

Do you think 2019 is going to be the summer where Private Investigators get their time in the sun again thanks to a fictitious northern divorcee with sex- and origami-addictions? Will you read Tightrope and be glad that Bev is so driven, so unregulated and so unprofessional in her conduct? Might you just enjoy the danger that little bit more knowing you could easily do her job…if only you were brave and foolhardy enough? Why don’t you let me know?!

Tightrope by Marnie Riches (£7.99, Trapeze Books) Out Now

What happens when a private investigator ends up being the one uncovered?  Having lost everything after a failed marriage, Beverley Saunders now lodges in the basement flat of a house owned by her best friend Sophie and her husband, Tim. With Bev's former glittering marketing career in the gutter, she begins to do investigative work for other wronged women, gathering dirt on philanderers, bosses and exes.  But when Beverley takes on the case of Sophie's friend Angela, who is seeking to uncover grounds for divorce from her controlling husband, Jerry, the shadow Science Minister, she soon discovers that she isn't the only one doing the investigating... Beverley has a secret history she doesn't want coming out - but will she manage to stay hidden long enough to give Angela the freedom she deserves?

Where ‘Crime & Mystery’ meets ‘Horror & the Weird’

Over at The Rap Sheet, there is an interesting interview feature with the award-winning cult horror writer Conrad Williams, discussing his crime-fiction debut novel Dust and Desire.

And then earlier this year, before I had to turn so much attention to my programming duties for 

Bouchercon 2015, I attended the latest Crimefest convention in Bristol, England. While there, I was drawn to one event that I eventually mentioned in my report for The Rap Sheet: 

There was also a very interesting Spotlight Session featuring horror writer-turned-crime fictionist Conrad Williams (Dust and Desire), who talked about the line that separates--or binds--those two literary genres. Not surprisingly, Nic Pizzolatto’s TV series, True Detective, merited a mention, as many of us are awaiting the start of its Season 2 with impatience and expectation.

I was already then planning a panel discussion for Bouchercon in Raleigh titled “Where Crime & Mystery Meet Horror & the Weird,” to be moderated by my dear friend Nanci Kalanta, so I had a professional interest in hearing what Williams had to say. Well, this bloke knew his mustard, as the saying goes. He was erudite and well-read, and his analysis of the subject flowed down the same pathways as my own. After the event, I went up to thank Williams for his part in the presentation and said that I would pick up one of his novels in the convention book room. (I was embarrassed to admit to a complete unfamiliarity with his work, which I later learned has a distinct cult following). He smiled at my enthusiasm, and then said, “You’re Ali, aren’t you?” In response to my nod he continued, “You probably don’t remember, but I e-mailed you several months ago--via a mutual friend--that I was wondering if you’d be interested in reading my first crime novel.” And then the penny dropped.

Read More Here

Shotsmag have discounted copies of Dust and Desire available Titan Books – Click Here to Order