If The World Is Your Playground, You Might Just Rub Shoulders With The Natives

I had refrained from commenting on minor whisperings of contention with the recent Dagger Awards but was aware of some expressed concerns at the number of foreigners who won. Perhaps the best place to read a summary on it is Mike Ripley’s Getting Away With Murder column at Shots, where he says:

All the major awards, it seems, have gone to writers from abroad. Admittedly two of them were colonials (American and Australian), but one, I was told in hushed tones, was actually French!

Pedants may point out that the Dagger in the Library was won by a Scottish person, Stuart MacBride, but I take that as cold comfort, for British crime writing seems in danger of becoming a minority sport.

According to my own personal database (where new titles are meticulously entered into a ledger by my factotum Waldo), it would appear that to date, some 529 new titles (books published in the UK for the first time) are scheduled for 2007. Of these, 264 are by British authors, but 265 are not. Of course, Waldo’s ledger will have more entries by the end of the year but the trend is ominous and 2007 could just be the year in which British writers form less than 50% of the gross crime fiction output.

(Can I have a minor rant about that ‘colonial’ bullshit first? I swear, the next time I’m in the UK and some pompous ass says “Oh the colonies” I’m going for blood**. I may have mostly British blood in my veins but I’ve heard too many people throw that at me with conceit and contempt, which just makes me want to emphasize my French surname all that much more. We aren’t some lesser hand-me-down Brits here, and if we are then stop your whining about Americans winning your awards right this minute. Good enough to sell your books to but still looking down your nose at us. It’s the root of that outdated and short-sighted attitude that could launch a whole rant about how crime fiction authors in this country are selling out their culture because the very people who criticize the use of stereotypes in fiction have Canadians limited to popular misconceptions that are spouted from the mouths of, well, idiots. Next time I hear a Canadian crime fiction author say they won’t write about Canada because it isn’t interesting, I have a simple suggestion for them if they don’t like it here: MOVE.)

Will we ever agree about awards? Will there ever be universal consensus on how organizations should run them? No. But it is not so much the awards, as the commentary here, that ruffles my feathers. The Daggers are not the only awards that are open internationally – The Edgar (save the ‘best first’ category, which is limited to Americans), The Barry, Anthony, Leftie (and probably a long list of others that I’m forgetting at the moment) all allow international competition.

Which is as it should be, in my opinion. The reality is that many British authors have won the Edgar, and many British authors have won fan choice awards in the US. Why is it suddenly worrying if foreigners are winning on British soil? After all, the award is for crime novel of the year. Not British Crime Novel, not American Crime Novel, not Crime Novel of the Year Written by One Of Our Own Kind… It’s for best novel. End of story. The very fact that anyone is publicly putting it on a blog that it’s a concern that too many non-Brits won suggests the perception that although foreigners might get nominated for the Daggers, they aren’t supposed to win them. And then those points are followed by numbers of titles being published this year by Brits and non-Brits.

What matters when it comes to awards is quality not quantity. It doesn’t matter if authors from the rest of the world are having as many books published in the UK this year as British authors are – what matters is the caliber of the books.

In fact, I find myself wondering if there’s a shift happening in the reading habits of the population that has yet to trickle through to the level of the awards. Allan Guthrie’s recent Theakston’s win for Two-Way Split, as well as his Edgar nomination for Kiss Her Goodbye show the kind of recognition he’s getting from the writing community, but the Theakston’s win was a bit of a surprise to me. Not because of quality, but because of the British love affair with police procedurals, and the fact that it seemed harder for Guthrie to earn a following on his home turf: It certainly was a bit harder for him to get a publisher there, initially. Two years attending Harrogate Crime Festival I can safely say most of the authors I rubbed shoulders with were writing in the mainstream. Police procedurals. If they were amateur sleuths they were lawyers or journalists (people with a reason to investigate). Al had a panel the one year, for new authors, but otherwise it seems that those writing about the meaner streets – Al, Ray Banks, Kevin Wignall, Ken Bruen – are missing from the equation.

If the British crime fiction community is concerned about the lack of awards this year, I hope they don’t have a knee-jerk reaction and just make foreigners ineligible. They need to get to the root of the issue, to look at what’s being published and perhaps ask why it is that particularly American authors have made such a strong showing. Get over your ‘colonial’ crap, forget the country on the passport and ask who’s producing what.

And for the record, a hard push from elsewhere can only be a good thing, because it pushes authors to be better. I always think when watching the Olympics, figure skating in particular, you don’t really want to win because the other guy fell. You want to win because everyone went out and skated their very best and you still outskated them. That’s what makes real champions. Nobody should get awards because of the country they were born in and nothing more – they should get the awards because they’ve earned them.

The truth is, I don’t put much stock in the awards. Okay, I’m very happy if friends are nominated. Happier still if they win. Hope that those who place in writing competitions will find themselves with contracts and book deals. Whatever works to build your career.

Ultimately, awards are subjective to a large degree. Taste is a definite factor. I didn’t find anything about the Dagger Awards particularly noteworthy, other than the number of nominations Gillian Flynn received. In hindsight, I agree her book has absolutely nothing to do with a James Bond-style thriller and haven’t a clue what’s going on with The Steel Dagger, which should probably be renamed or redefined if this is indicative of the books being nominated in the category.

But what I did notice lately from awards that left me perplexed had to do with The Barry Awards. George Easter, the Editor/Publisher for Deadly Pleasures, was good enough to explain how the awards worked in greater detail on 4MA, which alleviated most of my confusion. However, it’s the comments on The Rap Sheet that left me pondering awards in general, more than anything.

Says George:

”There are a handful of authors such as Lee Child and Michael Connelly who are so popular that if we listed one of their books as a nominee, they would win. They have each won two Barrys already and have asked not to be considered in the future so that others can be spotlit. We also try not to nominate the same authors in consecutive years, but we slipped up a bit on that front this year with Joe Finder and Simon Kernick. And speaking of Simon Kernick--I’ve got to go back a few years to see how many times he has been nominated without winning, but I would guess four or five times--I hope you are taking note of this exceptional writer and reading his books. I’d like to see him win one of these days. But he’s up against some tough competition again this year.”

I wish they’d post a list on their site of authors excluded because they’d win each year, or because they’ve requested not to be considered, or those not being considered because they were nominated in the previous year. That might sound a bit flippant, but I’m serious. There are always murmurings that awards are political, that people play favourites, or are sexist but this statement actually indicates that the Barry has an elaborate set of criteria that goes far beyond just what’s published in any given year. I had no idea if someone was nominated one year they’d typically eliminate them from consideration the next year (and am surprised, as Stuart MacBride won last year and has been nominated again this year). For the most part, I actually don’t care how awards are run, but just tell people how you do it so they can decide how much merit the award has.

This isn’t meant to be as critical as it probably sounds. Part of the reason I didn’t blog on it earlier was because it doesn’t matter that much to me. I guess there’s a part of me that finds sadness in the idea that award judging is entered with the preconception that specific authors are certain to win. I mean – gasp, shock, horrors – last year when I went to Harrogate I voted for Val McDermid for the Theakston’s prize. Everyone in the world (and probably various lifeforms in the universe that spy on us) knows who my favourite author is, and that person was shortlisted as well… But The Torment of Others was one of my favourite books and so I voted for the book on the list that I thought was the best, not the name of the author. (I mean, Val is one of my favourite authors, but you see the point I’m making…)

This is precisely why we’ve waffled over Spinetingler awards. We’ve talked about it. But every time we do I freeze up over the process. If we’re going to do awards I would want an open process in place. There are some awards that are limited to considering only the books the award givers choose to read (you can’t submit your book and be guaranteed they’ll read it). There are others that guarantee reading every title, but then have a little list of catches, similar to how the Barry works.

And then there are others that declare no process at all and who knows how they pick them.

You may be surprised to hear that the Barry Awards actually went up in my estimation (not that they were low before, but you know what I mean) when I understood how they worked. It actually made sense of some past lists that had – in my opinion – glaring oversights. Now, I know, not oversights. Just ineligibility for various reasons.

And the Edgar is certainly a respectable award.

What calls to question the credibility of the Dagger – and tarnishes it to some degree in my opinion – is the expressed idea that there’s a problem because only one Brit won this year. It infers an unstated belief that the Brits will always dominate the awards.

And it’s those unstated beliefs that surface that then give credibility to the arguments that the Daggers were trying to stack the awards in favour of British writers by removing authors who’d been translated from consideration for the top prize. Now it’s “look, we did that and the Brits still aren’t winning everything” instead of coming back with more determination to clean up next year.

As authors, I think it best for us to focus on writing the very best book we can, that fits the style of book we want to write, and not focus on the awards too much anyway. Recognition is nice, but nothing matches the experience of having someone tell you they read and loved your book. I had some fan mail this week, as well as a message left on my Crimespace page that said ”I think (Suspicious Circumstances is) excellent, and the best debut novel of the past year.”

And that, more than anything else, has me floating on air. I never even stop to think about the nationality of the person, usually, but this time I did. British. My other lovely letters of the week? Americans.

We live in a global village. My 2 cents to those flipping out over the non-Brit haul at the Daggers this year: Get used to it. We’re all happy for international sales, and that means we compete in a global marketplace. What’s next? Banning buying foreign rights so that local authors don’t suffer lack of sales too? I’m the first person to say that the UK features a number of incredible crime fiction authors that I’m a big fan of, but no industry can rest on its laurels either.

British crime fiction is strong. One anomalous result at the Daggers shouldn’t be enough to throw people in a panic, but my personal hope is that we’ll see Laura Lippman nominated for Best Novel next year. Now, that’s a nomination that’s long overdue, and I’d be thrilled to see her win.


** It is better to be referred to as an American, as Agent Phil regretted doing when I was last at Harrogate. What was incredible, though, were the Americans who pinpointed what part of Canada I was from off of accent alone. Kudos to them, because I doubt I could do likewise, despite my extensive travels in the US.