It's awards season for crime fiction - the time of year when the murky world of thrillers and mysteries is treated to a bit of glitz, and authors can take a night or two off from dreaming up knotty plots and grisly deaths. The awards most of them would kill for are the Daggers, which are dished out by the Crime Writers' Association tomorrow night. I'm hoping that James Lee Burke takes top honours with Pegasus Descending, the latest case for his Louisiana 'tec, Dave Robicheaux - and the best Burke I've ever read.
The subject of book awards is a touchy one for crime scribes, many of whom have long nursed grudges against the bigger literary prizes. PD James and Ian Rankin have both complained that crime - not to mention other genre writing - is unfavourably overlooked in these matters. When he picked up his Nibby from Richard and Judy earlier this year, winning in the crime thriller category, Ian Rankin couldn't help but bring the issue up again.
I agree with his argument that the genre's best books use an established format as a basis for a biting exploration of contemporary social issues. A case in point: Richard Price's Clockers, which is due new consideration with the success of the US TV series, The Wire. Price's doorstop novel is an intricately detailed document of ghetto life as seen from the inside - and a blistering thriller to boot. But where do most bookshops shelve it? In general fiction rather than the crime section, presumably because the book is believed to have "transcended" the perceived limitations of the genre.
Back to the Daggers: the main prize hands the winner £20,000, and Burke's competition is pretty stiff. There's Giles Blunt's psycho-thriller Fields of Grief, a chilling debut from Gillian Flynn called Sharp Objects, Craig Russell's serial killer saga Brother Grimm, the historical mystery Sovereign by CJ Sansom and Peter Temple's The Broken Shore, which has won acclaim for its frank confrontation of Australian politics.
The Daggers recognise the different styles of crime writing by splitting their other awards into a variety of categories. As well as gongs for previously unpublished authors and foreign-language titles in translation (controversially, they're now barred from consideration for the main prize), there's a prize for "the author of crime fiction whose work is currently giving the greatest enjoyment to readers". Come again? It's a fuzzy description but the award's official name gives it a much more incisive appeal: "The Dagger in the Library". There's also a trophy for adventure/thriller novels "in the vein of James Bond" - this is the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger, won last year by Nick Stone's Mr Clarinet, a Haitian escapade so gripping I resented every second I couldn't spend reading it.
I can't help but wish for some more exciting categories: best hard men (Allan Guthrie, surely), slickest twists (Harlan Coben's The Woods), femme fatale (any suggestions?), but it's good to see the Daggers rewarding shameless entertainment. After all, knowing how to grease the wheels of an intricate whodunnit is an act of supreme craftsmanship, even if I personally prefer novels that avoid final-page revelations and aren't afraid to leave loose ends. That's life, after all - or, to borrow James Ellroy's assertion, "closure is bullshit".
Really, though, I'm a sucker for every shade of the genre: from the butchered poetry of David Peace's Red Riding Quartet to Elmore Leonard's glossy pulp confections, via works like Natsuo Kirino's horror procedural Out and James Sallis's elliptical Long-Legged Fly, crime pays dividends to its readers and deserves more prizes.
