The Dagger Awards

Despite its enormous appeal today, the crime story only became recognized as a serious genre around 1900. Mauritz Hansen of Norway published the first novel of this kind in 1839, sporting the catchy title of The Murder of Machine Operator Rolfsen. It was not, apparently, a great success. American Edgar Allen Poe's works quickly became known worldwide; but England's Sir Arthur Conan Doyle popularized the theme with his still-beloved Sherlock Holmes stories.

Today the literary world awards at least twenty-eight separate annual prizes for mystery and detective fiction. The oldest (the Edgar Award, which you can read about in a previous NJ post) came into being in 1946. Newest on the scene is the First Crime Novel Contest sponsored by the Mystery Writers of America and St. Martin's Minotaur, popping up in 2007. Between the newborn and the venerable scamper an amazing number of prizes given for excellence in various branches of the mystery family, from private eye tales to gay and lesbian mysteries to crime stories created by Japanese writers.

Don't worry, I won't cover them all. Not now, anyway. Today I'm just here to talk about the Dagger Awards, sponsored by the UK-based Crime Writers Association. First known as the Crossed Red Herring Award, this contest has skulked around under one alias or another since 1955.

In 2006, thanks to new sponsorship from the Duncan Lawrie Bank, the award was renamed the Duncan Lawrie Dagger. With a prize of £20,000, this is the world's biggest prize for crime fiction. (Who says crime doesn't pay?) Every year this bounty is bestowed upon a novel an author of any nationality provided the book was written in English and published in the UK.

But that's not all. The Duncan Lawrie International Dagger is pulled on a crime novel not originally written in English but translated into English for UK publication. The winning author wins £5000 and the translator takes home £1000. The Steel Dagger, sponsored by Ian Fleming Publications, Ltd., awards £2000 to a thriller, which James Bond creator Ian Fleming defined as a story that, when reading, "one simply has to turn the page."

Another annual Dagger goes to a non-fiction work, and the New Blood Dagger is thrust upon a first book by a previously unpublished writer, first published in the UK.

And let's not forget the Cartier Diamond Dagger, presented for sustained excellence in the genre of crime writing. On May 7, this year's award will go to American writer Sue Grafton for her Kinsey Millhone alphabet series of private eye novels. The first, A is for Alibi, was inspired by her own divorce. She said, "For months I lay in bed and plotted to kill my ex-husband, but I knew I'd bungle it and get caught so I wrote it in a book instead." Her latest, T is for Trespass, came out last December in the US and is due for release this month in the UK. She plans to carry the series all the way through Z.

When I was 10-12 year old, I read mysteries almost exclusively. I must have overdosed on them, because nowadays I'll usually go for something else. Lately, though, I find myself thinking about writing one. Think I'll take a stab at it.

But don't worry -- unlike Sue Grafton, my inspiration doesn't come from a husband, ex- or otherwise.

Seriously, it doesn't.

Why are you looking at me like that?

Note: Fleming and Grafton quotations from the Crime Writers Association website (http://www.thecwa.co.uk/daggers/2008/steel.html and http://www.thecwa.co.uk/daggers/2008/cartier.html respectively.