At the 1993 Edgar Awards banquet, the best first novel award went to a new author named Michael Connelly, whose debut Harry Bosch novel The Black Echo had been published the previous year. The promise of that first book has clearly been fulfilled, with Connelly going on to become one of the most prolific and…
Over nearly a decade as a bookseller at Barnes & Noble, I came to know the big names in every genre. Even if I’d never read one of their books myself, I could recommend them to customers based on the author’s reputation and the reader’s interests. Margaret Maron was one of those big names. I…
Lawrence Block published A Dance at the Slaughterhouse, the ninth book featuring his iconic detective Matthew Scudder, in 1991 (it won the Edgar in 1992). It takes place in an increasingly unfamiliar world to modern readers. Scudder, a recovering alcoholic and former cop, regularly stalks the “Duce,” as they used to call the pre-gentrified stretch…
Perusing the list of Edgar winners, trying to decide which I wanted to tackle for this retrospective, New Orleans Mourning jumped out almost immediately thanks to its utterly gonzo synopsis: It’s Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and civic leader and socialite Chauncey St. Amant has been crowned Rex, King of Carnival. But his day of…
Published in 1989, James Lee Burke’s Black Cherry Blues was the first of his two books to win the Edgar Award for Best Novel (his other came in 1998 for Cimarron Rose). It is the third in Burke’s signature series starring Detective Dave Robicheaux, a recovering alcoholic and Vietnam War veteran from New Iberia, Louisiana.…
In a time when Russian malfeasance on the global stage dominates our discourse, it’s refreshing to read a book that explores the humanity and tenderness of the Russian people. A Cold, Red Sunrise, the fifth in the Inspector Rostnikov series, takes place toward the end of the Cold War. Ordinary people are at the mercy…
Aaron Elkins’ Old Bones, the fourth novel in the Gideon Oliver Mysteries series, won the Edgar Award in 1988 and has been continuously in print since then. With its elegant prose and dialogue-heavy writing, the book is a master class in classic whodunits and one of the first modern novels to delve deep into forensic…
I wish I could have eavesdropped on the Edgar committee for 1987. “Are you kidding me?” someone might have said. “A Dark-Adapted Eye? Barbara Vine, whoever that is, tells who did it on page one! What kind of a mystery is that?” Someone else may have chimed in. “Listen, Barbara Vine is a pseudonym for Ruth…
The first Canadian winner of the Edgar for Best Novel features, perhaps stereotypically, features a Mountie and a librarian politely declining to discuss a murder where they both know whodunnit. The Mountie is Staff Sergeant Karl Alberg, a divorced forty-something who misses his daughters back in Calgary but has no intention of leaving his posting…
Ross Thomas’ Briarpatch won the Edgar Award for Best Novel in 1985, the year my younger brother was born, eight years after my own birthday. Like the protagonist of the novel in relation to his decade-younger sibling, I spent several years being my brother’s de facto parent until he went off to college. I didn’t…
