One Judge’s Tale

Last year, I judged the Edgar Awards for the Mystery Writers of America. I was on the committee that selected Best Novel.

My committee was nine judges to start with, including me. One judge dropped out somewhere around August, perhaps overwhelmed by the number of books or underwhelmed by the stories he was reading. I’ll never know.

In all, our committee evaluated 535 books.

That is not a typo.

Five hundred.

And 35.

The UPS guy was at my door three or four times a week. FedEx, same thing. Books came in the mail, too. They piled up all over the house, but their primary residence was on the landing and stairs to my basement office.

You can watch a clip of me announcing the winner last week in New York City. It was quite the honor to be involved in this process and even more of an honor to chair the group.

How did we manage to judge 535 books? I won’t go into the details. Every judging process is different and every judging process has its own rules.

With eight judges participating in the group email chatter about why we liked one book or didn’t like another, one thing became very clear—that the five finalists and one winner would have broad appeal. There were a couple of titles that, to me, belonged in the final five. One title in particular blew me away. But one judge is only one judge. Other judges had their favorites as well.

So what did the five have in common? What made them standouts?

If I had to boil that answer down to two attributes, it would be these:

1. Strong idea.

2. Smooth, bold, confident execution that didn’t draw attention to itself. (Story over flashy prose, in other words.)

In all five finalists, I think the one thing that ties them together is that the story and the character are matched perfectly with the tone and unwavering voice of the storyteller.

True fact: some offbeat, quirky stories were not in the final mix of five. That doesn’t mean those books were in any way unworthy. In fact, there are many titles that have already sold FAR MORE copies and will sell FAR MORE copies in the future than the final five from our process. And there are a few titles that grappled with unusual subjects in unusual ways or in unusual settings that truly impacted a few judges and are now among our favorite books of all time—but that didn’t make the final five. Group process means group results.

One thing is clear—there were a ton of great mysteries published in 2017. Of the 535, I could have easily promoted 50 or 60 titles as interesting reads to various friends. And there were a bunch of books that seemed to be playing it a bit too safe, that had that paint-by-numbers flavor to them. (These 535 are only a fraction of all mysteries published last year, given independent presses, small presses, and self-published works, too.)

I guess the question is, can you plan ahead to write an award-winning book? It would be nice if that was the case—here’s the formula, go to it. But it’s no formula. It’s the special alchemy of writing, when a writer’s vision and story connect in some mysterious way that takes the readers to unexpected places and shows them the world in a new way or through fresh eyes.

Advice culled from all this? Choose your best idea. Stick with it. Write it with conviction. It never hurts to let the reader know, early on, that you know your story and you’re the right writer to tell it. A sure hand will give the reader confidence to sit back and go with the flow. At that point, you’ve got readers right where you want them: in your hands.

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The five finalists were:

The Dime by Kathleen Kent (Hachette Book Group – Little, Brown & Co./Mulholland Books)
Prussian Blue by Philip Kerr (Penguin Random House – Marian Wood Books/G.P. Putnam’s Sons)
Bluebird, Bluebird* by Attica Locke (Hachette Book Group – Little, Brown & Co./Mulholland Books)
A Rising Man by Abir Mukherjee (Pegasus Books)
The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley by Hannah Tinti (Penguin Random House – The Dial Press)

*Winner