The World's Finest Mystery... (8 page)

(Arrow) features a young Billy Glasheen and charts his early apprenticeship as a "lurk" merchant at the end of the war. Shamus winner Marele Day made a brief but welcome to the crime fold, by collecting her Mavis Levack short detective stories (an Australian Miss Marple) as
Mavis Levack, P. I.
(Allen and Unwin), in which her main series detective Claudia Valentine also makes an appearance.

 

 

Janis Spehr won the Scarlet Stiletto Award for the second year running with her story "Dead Woman in the Water." Sydney crime writer Gabrielle Lord presented the awards in Melbourne.

 

 

It was also quite a good year for exhibitions devoted to the subject of crime fiction. The Baillieu Library, University of Melbourne, included much crime in its "Sensational Tales: Australian Popular Publishing 1890s–1990s" exhibit. In Sydney, the Justice and Police Museum was host to "Hardboiled: the Detective in Popular Fiction," which ran every weekend until October 2001. A continuing exhibition at the State Library of Victoria is "Cover Girl Cries Murder: Australian Pulp Fiction of the 1950s," largely showcasing the library's important recent acquisition of work by Marc Brody (Melbourne journalist W. H. Williams), a collection of seventy-two novels that were the author's own copies. Other pulp fictions on display were by "Carter Brown," "Larry Kent," and rare items by "K. T. McCall," once billed as "crime fiction's best-selling female author." Text also reprinted a blast from Australian crime fiction's past with
The Murder of Madeleine Brown
, originally published in 1887 by the socialist poet Francis Adams. The introduction, marred only by a lack of references, was by Shane Maloney.

 

 

The Australian crime-film sensation of the year was
Chopper
, the true story of criminal Mark Read, which won A.F.I. awards for best direction, best actor, and supporting actor. It was also featured at Sundance Film Festival. The film version of Dorothy Porter's award-winning detective novel-poem,
The Monkey's Mask
, was released in March 2001, along with a tie-in edition of the book from PanMacmillan. Paul Thomas has had his character Tito Ihaka transferred to the television. New Zealander Thomas, who won the inaugural Ned Kelly Award for
Inside Dope
, wrote the screenplay for "Ihaka Blunt Instrument" which was screened by Channel Ten. The tough Maori cop visits Sydney, ostensibly on a training exercise, only to find himself solving a long-closed case with the help of a female federal officer.

 

 

Crime Factory
is a new Australian crime magazine. The first issue was published in February 2001. Predominantly concerned with crime fiction, it also includes a section devoted to true crime. The first issue has interviews with prolific Melbourne writer Kerry Greenwood, Tami Hoag, Edna Buchanan, and Edward Bunker. For further information see www.crimefactory.net.

 

 

 

World Mystery Report: Canada

Edo van Belkom

Although most lovers of mystery and crime fiction might not consider it a work that's truly in genre, the most talked about and celebrated Canadian crime novel of 2000 is probably Margaret Atwood's
The Blind Assassin
. Atwood's tenth novel is a family drama that delves into the seedy underworld of the 1930s, replete with references to pulp fiction gin joints and the rest of the period's staples. The book won the coveted 2000 Booker Prize and is a top contender for all of the usual Canadian literary honors, such as the Governor General's Award. A more traditional crime novel that garnered plenty of attention within the genre is
Deadly Decisions
, the third novel by forensic anthropologist and best-selling author Kathy Reichs.

 

 

As crime novelists, Atwood and Reichs are as dissimilar as two writers can be (one is a "literary writer" and the other is a scientist moonlighting as a mystery author), but in a somewhat roundabout way they are both in the same boat and indicative of the sort of thing that goes on in all Canadian literary genres.

 

 

Canadians are eager to embrace someone like Atwood as a crime novelist because her inclusion validates the genre as a whole. Atwood was the subject of a similar inclusion when her novel
The Handmaid's Tale
was pronounced to be science fiction, a label she rejected at every opportunity. And Reichs, while only spending six months of the year working for the Quebec government— the other half is spent in North Carolina where she works in the office of the chief medical examiner and is a professor at the University of North Carolina— is still considered Canadian by her Canadian publisher, Canadian booksellers, and Canadian awards administrators.

 

 

The truth is that there are many great crime and mystery novels published each year by Canadians living year-round in that country and publishing all of their works in the genre. The year 2000 saw the publication of new novels by John Ballem (
Machineel
); Gail Bowen (
Burying Ariel
); Laurence Gough (
Funny Money
); Lyn Hamilton (
The Celtic Riddle
); Kenneth Oppel (
The Devil's Cure
); Caroline Roe— a.k.a. Medora Sale (
Solace For a Sinner
); and Eric Wright (
The Kidnapping Of Rosie Dawn
). Other notable books included
Hangman
by Michael Slade, a pseudonym, this time for Vancouver lawyer Jay Clarke and his daughter Rebecca; and
Evil Never Sleeps
, written by real-life police detective K. G. E. Konkel. Also, Peter Robinson published a new Inspector Banks novel called
Cold Is the Grave
. Robinson, a transplanted Brit, enjoys dual literary citizenship— much like Reichs— and is Canadian while in Canada but claimed by the British whenever he lands in the U.K., which is a couple of times a year.

 

 

A couple of short-fiction publications of note were a pair of anthologies associated with the Crime Writers of Canada. First is the
Arthur Ellis Awards
anthology, edited by Peter Sellers, and published by Quarry Press (P.O. Box 1061, Kingston, Ontario, K7L 4Y5). The book features a history of the CWC, the first twelve winners of the Best Mystery Short Story from 1988 to 1999, a complete list of Ellis Award nominees during that period, and a list of international award–winning works by Canadians. All royalties from the book go to the CWC to help pay for the ongoing administration of the awards. The second anthology is
Over the Edge
, a reprint anthology featuring works by members of the CWC, edited by Peter Sellers and Robert J. Sawyer, and published by Pottersfield Press (83 Leslie Rd. East Lawrencetown, N.S., B3Z 1P8).

 

 

Toronto played host to the seventeenth annual Arthur Ellis Awards banquet in May with a satellite awards dinner held simultaneously on the West Coast in an RCMP officers' mess. Winners of this year's hangman's trophy were:

 

 

Best Novel:
The Feast of Stephen
, Rosemary Aubert

 

 

Best True Crime:
Cowboys and Indians
, Gordon Sinclair Jr.

 

 

Best First Crime Novel:
Lost Girls
, Andrew Pyper

 

 

Best Short Story: "One More Kill" (from
Blue Murder Magazine
), Matt Hughes

 

 

Best Juvenile Novel:
How Can a Brilliant Detective Shine in the Dark
? Linda Bailey

 

 

Best Novel (French):
Louna
, Lionel Noel.

 

 

In addition the CWC honored four volunteers who had served the organization over the past sixteen years with the Derrick Murdoch Award: Eddie Barber, Rick Blechta, John North, and David Skene-Melvin.

 

 

Finally, no year-end roundup would be complete without a mention of Bloody Words. In its second year, Bloody Words (www.bloodywords.com) is Canada's only annual mystery conference, taking place in Toronto each June. This year's guest of honor was L. R. Wright, while special guests were Howard Engel and Caroline Roe (Medora Sale) and McClelland and Stewart editor Dinah Forbes.

 

 

 

World Mystery Report: Germany

Thomas Woertche

The year 2000 saw a radical change concerning the German mystery market that affected most German authors of the genre. The German crime-fiction/suspense market is strongly dominated by foreign authors, especially Americans. But that is true for all of Europe; even the British complain about "U.S. steamrolling." Compared to Britain, however, Germany has always suffered an enormous contradiction (due to the nearly complete lack of crime-fiction tradition) between quantity and quality, i.e., the large number of crime writers and their books and the tiny number of those among them who have international reputations.

 

 

What happened last year, thanks to the general and international "concentration on the book market," is that most of the big publishing companies closed down their traditional and established crime lines. Classics like rororo Thriller (Rowohlt Publishers' famous "black line") vanished as well as the not-less-famous Gelbe Reihe ("yellow line") of Ullstein Publishers, the Goldmann Krimis, the Heyne Krimis (of, respectively, Goldmann, a division of Bertelsmann, and Heyne Publishers). That means that a lot of authors of solidly woven "pret-a-porter" novels lost their publishing grounds. They had to seek asylum with either print-on-demand alternatives— and that kind of publisher, like Verlag der Criminale, popped up almost immediately— or with small publishing houses. Some of the latter, like Grafit Verlag in Dortmund or the rather recently founded Militzke Verlag in Leipzig, did have some reputation before, mostly as a forum for regional to national literature. For them it was, of course, also a chance to broaden their programs. Edition Trèves in Trier got more sophisticated, and Emons Verlag in Cologne even includes fashionable period pieces now, from medieval times to eighteenth-century backgrounds.

 

 

With big companies closing down crime-fiction lines, the readers and aficionados of crime fiction of course do not vanish. And the big publishers do indeed take care of them by displaying global blockbusters such as Tom Clancy, Patricia Cornwell, Mary Higgins Clark, Elizabeth George et al. Again, this is true for Europe as a whole, but there are differences. Swedish best-seller Henning Mankell for example is top-selling in Germany too, whereas American Donna Leon, with her Venice-based novels, is a German top-seller only.

 

 

The most interesting side effect stemming from the big companies genre-list shutdown has been mostly ignored in public debate. Mystery novels, suspense, crime fiction, these subgenres of fiction, are no longer labeled as such in the big companies' catalogs. It's "integrated," and that means "lost," in their mainstream lines. The label now is simply "novel." The result: the term "genre" is back where it used to be until two decades ago— equal to bad, low stuff.

 

 

However, there are promising counterwaves. The small Distel-Verlag in Heilbronn, for instance, recently started a completely new line, specializing in classic and new French writers, cooperating with the famous "Serie noir" of Paris publisher Gallimard. Unionsverlag in Zürich, Switzerland, started its "UT metro" line in spring 2000, presenting suspense fiction not from the usual sources— Anglo-Saxon fields like the U.S. or the U.K.— but from literally all over the world: Asia, Africa, Latin America, Australia, and Europe (including Turkey).

 

 

The consequences of these changes are enormous for most of the German-writing and German-speaking authors. Last decade's "scene kings and queens" —made not primarily by broad audiences but by opinion leaders of the very scene itself— like Ingrid Noll, Doris Gercke, Sabine Deitmer, Peter Zeindler (Swiss), Jürgen Alberts, Regula Venske, et al. are remarkably silent. It seems as though the readers (and buyers) are tired of all the middle-class cozies and "diaper mysteries."

 

 

The situation is well reflected in the 2000 awards for crime fiction. The Glauser, an annual award of German-language crime-writers club Syndikat was given to Uta-Maria Heim for her novel
Engelchens Ende
. Syndikat represents a large number of authors, but actually very few of even national importance. Uta-Maria Heim is a good writer and
not
part of that network, and so it's a little sensation that someone from "outside" got last year's Glauser.

 

 

Even more significant for the change is the German Mystery Award (Deutscher Krimipreis) for 2000. While the Glauser comes with DM 10,000 (about $4,500), the Deutscher Krimipreis does not include money. But it is the award with the highest prestige— it cannot be manipulated. It has a national (meaning German-language) and an international category. The national winner for 2000 was Ulrich Ritzel's
Schwemmholz
(published by a tiny Swiss publisher, Libelle Verlag). In second place was Ann Chaplet's
Nichts als die Wahrheit
(by Verlag Antje Kunstmann, Munich, an independent mainstream publisher), and coming in third was Sam Jaun's
Fliegender Sommer
(by another tiny Swiss publisher, Cosmos Verlag).

 

 

Ritzel's novel is his second. He used to be a courtroom and police reporter in a small southern German town. Sam Jaun is Swiss, living partly in Berlin, who comes up with a new Swiss-countryside mystery about every seven years.

 

 

Many other authors who have been acclaimed and accepted by the readers during the last year are either complete outsiders or newcomers, like Horst Eckert, Jürg Juretzka, or Heinrich Steinfeld and Wolf Haas (both of Vienna, Austria). Munich writer Friedrich Ani's fine novel
German Angst
had a likewise fine success and Tobias O. Meissner published the season's most interesting novel,
Todestag
(by Eichborn Verlag), about a fatal assault on Chancellor Schröder.
Todestag
, unlike most of the present German-language fiction in general, is serious and even thrilling literature.