There is the Oscar, a bald naked man holding a sword. And the Emmy, a winged woman holding an atom. And then there’s the Edgar, a ceramic bust of Edgar Allen Poe and probably the ugliest award on the planet.

I mention this because the statuette’s unattractiveness (not Poe himself) was a major theme at last night’s 61st Annual  Edgar Awards, held at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in New York City.  It started at Table 44 where I was honored to be sitting with such noted mystery authors as Julia Spencer-Fleming (All Mortal Flesh), Marshall Karp (The Rabbit Factory), and Jonathon King (Eye of Vengence and the forthcoming Acts of Nature, to be reviewed in our May 15 issue). Noting that each seat at the table had an Edgar Allan Poe Noddler or bobblehead, King and I discussed how these were so much more attractive than the real award.

And then King told me when he won his Edgar Award in 2003 for The Blue Edge of Midnight, his then-ten-year-old daughter offered to repaint the statuette to make it prettier.

It went downhill from there. One presenter advised winners to enjoy their ugly awards, and then when the winner of the Best First Novel by American Author was about to be announced, one of the statuettes broke in half. Was it due to the malevolent presence of Grand Master Stephen King, as one waggish presenter suggested, or did the Edgar, as another presenter noted, finally realize how ugly he was and broke in two? Whatever the cause, the winner Alex Berenson (The Faithful Spy) good-naturedly clutched both pieces of the Edgar in his hands as he thanked his editors and Random House for booking his hotel in Boston where he met his current girlfriend while on his book tour..

Moderated by Today show weatherman Al Roker, the ceremony moved quickly, ending at a surprisingly early 9:45 pm. The night’s biggest surprise was Jason Goodwin winning the Best Novel Award for The Janissary Tree. Goodwin could not be present to accept his award as his publisher had been too cheap to pay for his airplane ticket to fly over from England, an act publisher Sarah Crichton said she “deeply, deeply regrets” as she accepted the award. Crichton was refreshingly honest as she told the audience that she hadn’t expected Goodwin’s tale of a eunuch detective in 1830s Istanbul to win.

Other winners included Naomi Hirahara (Snakeskin Shamisen) for Best Paperback Original, James L. Swanson (Manhunt; The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer) for Best Fact Crime, and E.J. Wagner (The Science of Sherlock HOlmes) for Best Critical/Biographical. Interestingly, the winners for Best Television Feature/Mini-Series Teleplay were the writers for Season 4 of HBO’s series The Wire, and these included some of the finest crime fiction authors working today: Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos, and Richard Price.

The highlight of the evening was the recognition of Stephen King as a Mystery Grand Master. After an amusing introduction by Dave Barry and  Ridley Pearson, as well as an inadvertently almost forgotten Donald Westlake,  KIng told the audience that he never called himself a horror writer and that the first three adult books he checked out from the local bookmobile that came through his Maine hometown were crime novels by Richard Stark, Ed McBain, and John D. McDonald. “These books changed my life,” King said, explaining that  they opened up his mind to what he could write about. “The reason why mystery and suspense are the most important genres today,” he said,” is because they mimic life. How we enter and leave life is a mystery.”  King ended his brief defense of genre fiction, stating firmly, “anyone who says this isn’t mainstream fiction is full of bullshit.”

It’s been a year now since Pegasus Books launched its list—and if LJ’s reviews are any indication, this New York City independent deserves a P. Diddy–style anniversary celebration, complete with Cristal and a novelty book cake. Over the last few months, we have reviewed David Brown’s Tchaikovsky: The Man and His Music and Roger Osborne’s Civilization: A New History of the Western World. Between April and May, we’ll cover Nicholas Kenyon’s The Pegasus Pocket Guide to Mozart, Ted Mitchell’s Thomas Wolfe: An Illustrated Biography, and Ed Gorman’s Fools Rush In.

Every one has garnered high praise, if not a star, and I can’t help but be amazed. Publisher Claiborne Hancock, who acquired titles at Carroll & Graf for many years, seems to have a hound’s nose for quality, and I only hope it will translate to big-time makings. The world needs more presses like this little winged pony, which very wisely deals in that library staple, mystery. For my part, I love their spin on biography, which seems to combine a highly personalized point of view with upper-crust research and quirky miscellany. Fly high, Pegasus. Here’s to a very good year.

If a subway commute can set the tone of a day, it’s going to be an atypically good Tuesday. This morning, I didn’t have to lubricate my shoulders to fit into a car, AND there were sightings galore. Standing directly in front of me were two nursing students highlighting away in textbooks whose titles escape me; to my left and right, I took in at least four examples of popular fiction, most in subway-friendly mass market paperback.

Michael Connelly’s The Concrete Blonde (Warner, 1994) captured my attention because of its title, a nod, I couldn’t help thinking, to Concrete Blonde, a favorite band of mine from Los Angeles. Not surprisingly, that’s where Connelly’s Edgar Award–winning Harry Bosch novels take place. The second in the series, Blonde homes in on a serial killer who disfigures women’s faces, not an original conceit as far as I can tell, but what do I know about mysteries?

I admit it: I’ve never read a Connelly. In fact, as I wrote in The Case of the Nonmystery Readers, I haven’t killed time with a single contemporary mystery. Not even a 20th-century old schooler like Raymond Chandler, Connelly’s hero. I’m not sure if this makes me squeamish, prudish, snobbish, or just plain poorly read. How can I be out of the biggest genre-fiction loop ever? My answer: other books (including last week’s Subway Sighting, The History of Love) just get in the way.

The Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance (SIBA) has announced its long list of nominees for the 2007 SIBA Book Award.Twenty-six novels, 24 nonfiction titles, 19 children’s books, 12 cookbooks, and six volumes of poetry made it past the first round of voting; following a selection of the finalists, the winners will be announced in June. 

To be eligible for nomination, a book has to have been published in 2006 and be about the South or written by a Southerner. Hence the fiction list has an interesting mix of the usual Southern suspects (Lee Smith’s On Agate Hill, Howard Bahr’s The Judas Field, Mark Childress’s One Mississippi) and some surprising picks (The Templar Legacy by South Carolina’s Steve Berry and The Collectors—well, David Baldacci is from Virginia, and the book is set in the nation’s capital, which at its core is very much a Southern city). But the novel  that should win just for the title alone is Mark Schweitzer’s comic liturgical mystery The Soprano Wore Falsettos, set in North Carolina.

On the nonfiction front, nominees included three regional reference works, The Encyclopedia of Appalachia, The Encyclopedia of North Carolina and South Carolina Encyclopedia, as well as Erik Reece’s compelling Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness (which was also picked as one of LJ’s Best Books of 2006), and the intriguing (to this oenophile) Thomas Jefferson on Wine by John Hailman. (Who knew the Founding Father was the Robert Parker of his day?)

For a complete listing of nominees, see Authors ‘Round the South (authorsroundthesouth.com), the SIBA-sponsored website to promote author appearances at independent bookstores in the South.

In today’s New York Times resident pop fiction reviewer Janet Maslin gives a favorable review to a first novel by Joe Hill. Calling it a Valentine from Hell, Maslin praised Heart-Shaped Box  as a “wild, mesmerizing, perversely witty tale of horror”. And who is this Joe Hill? None other than Joseph Hillstrom King, the son of you-know-who. While our reviewer Kart G. Siewert of the Tulsa City County Library noted some predictability in the plot, he called the novel “a wrenching and effective ghost story…that reads like good early [Stephen] King mixed with some of the edgier splatterpunk sensibilities of David J. Schow (The Kill Riff)”.

I know there will be high demand for this title, but make sure your patrons don’t confuse with it with April Henry’s amateur sleuth mystery Heart-Shaped Box. However, this might be the perfect time to steal a page from Entertainment Weekly and do a reader’s advisory display of novels with the same titles. A Battle of the Books! How about David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas versus Liam Callanan’s The Cloud Atlas? Or Geraldine Brooks’s March duking it out with E.L. Doctorow’s The March? Or Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man going head to head with  H.G. Well’s Invisible Man? Check out  library blog Papercuts for more suggestions.

A French-language film adaptation of Harlan Coben’s nail-biting thriller Tell No One was named best picture of 2006 at the Lumiere awards (the French equivalent of the Golden Globes) in Paris Feb. 5. The picture, which was released in France Nov. 1 and has been nominated for nine Cesar awards (French Oscars), also won the audience prize, for which French filmgoers were invited to vote. Directed by Guilliaume Canet, Ne Le Dis a Personne stars Kristin Scott Thomas (The English Patient), Francois Cluzet, and Nathalie Baye and features a brief walk-on by Coben himself. Until the film is released in the United States, Coben fans will have to satisfy their curiosity at the film’s website  Ne Le Dis A Personne but they’ll have to brush up on their high-school francais!

In the midst of editing Jo Ann Vicarel’s  March 1 mystery column yesterday (we always work two months in advance of an issue date), one review of a promising new series intrigued me. The book under question was Deadman’s Switch featuring a fresh new sleuth, crisis manager Charlotte Lyon who must make her client Sun Rail look as caring as possible after a fatal derailment. Sadly its author, Barbara Seranella, creator of the gritty Munch Mancini series (No Man Standing), died on Saturday Jan. 21 while awaiting a liver transplant.  A few weeks before her death, Seranella had written a poignant Los Angeles Times editorial about her long battle with illness, and mystery author Denise Hamilton offers a moving tribute. In her memory, as one Dorothy-L listserver suggested, buy her books and be sure to fill out the organ-donor slot on your driver’s license. 

Speaking of mysteries, today is the 198th birthday of the strange genius considered to be the father of the detective story and crime fiction. Rather than leave a bottle of cognac and three roses on Edgar Allan Poe’s Baltimore grave like the city’s famous and mysterious Poe Toaster (memorably depicted in Laura Lippman’s In a Strange City), the Mystery Writers of America chose to commemorate the day by announcing their nominees for the 2007 Edgar Allen Poe Awards, honoring the best in mystery fiction and nonfiction published in 2006. 

Best novel nominees include:

The nominees for a Best First Novel by An American Author are:

Sarah Weinman’s mystery blog, Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind, offers an insightful analysis of what the nominations mean, pointing out that ” If there’s a trend, it’s toward intelligent fiction from outside our normal boundaries, be it historical, cultural or psychological”. Indeed of three of the best novel nominees—literary novelist Louis Bayard, Chocolat author Joanne Harris, and travel writer Jason Goodwin— would not be considered  mystery authors in the traditional sense. Maybe the  strict barriers that have placed genre fiction like mystery in a literary ghetto are starting to break down. Maybe like Edgar Allen Poe, mysteries can finally be judged on their own literary merits as fiction worthy of serious attention. 

The popularity of mystery books never ceases to amaze this peripheral admirer of the genre (read last year’s Book Buying Survey and catch the latest coming in the Feb. 15 issue). I say “peripheral admirer” because I quite literally have never read a contemporary mystery—unless I can count the several volumes in the “Choose Your Own Adventure” series I devoured in the mid- to late 1980s—and yet I love the idea of murder as formula. Oh, the gruesome possibilites! Oh, the intrigue!

Strangely enough, my reading habits aren’t so unique. Yesterday, I ate pizza with two co-workers who are avid readers yet have never consumed a modern mystery to their knowledge either (!!). When we tried to get to the bottom of why, no one cited poor literary breeding. Mysteries, we well know from reading LJ’s Mystery Column, can be very accomplished and intellectually stimulating. Check P.D. James and Walter Mosley, favorites of our own Francine Fialkoff and Michael Rogers, respectively.

One of us did, however, make the point that mysteries can seem almost demanding. There’s quite literally a case to crack, and her brain balks at that kind of a challenge. I can relate to that point, but I would augment it by saying mystery readers seem like a slightly scary gang. What if I don’t fit in? Will I get a pair of cement shoes if I don’t lap up the gory details? What if I don’t “get” the mystery even at the end (this happens to me with mystery movies all the time)? I hate feeling stupid after having indebted myself to Uncle Sam for tens of thousands of dollars for grad school.

For the record, I don’t want to remain a nonmystery reader forever. My brain could use a good stretching and blood splattering, and I might as well start with the best of last year as determined by LJ’s Jo Ann Vicarel. 

Yesterday morning, I came across a gem of a post on good ole Publib. “Off the Beat” told of the Madison (WI) P.L.’s list of recommended reads by the local police officers, and heavy-hitting history rules the precincts—e.g., Eloise Engel and Lauri Paananen’s The Winter War: The Russo Finnish Conflict, 1939-40 and Doris Kearns Goodwin’s No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, the Home Front in World War II. That same poster mentioned that mysteries happen to be very popular with prison patrons. (A Google search I did located an August 2005 story in the China Daily newspaper about the favorite reads of Guantanamo detainees. According to the unidentified prison librarian, Harry Potter was tops, and right on his heels was Agatha Christie.)

In all seriousness, I’d like to see prison patrons’ top picks in the genre because I am fascinated by the genre’s appeal across populations (according to our 2006 Book Buying Survey, “[I]n genre, mystery still reigns supreme”—and demand keeps on keeping on). Just from reading LJ’s Mystery column, I do know that mysteries often involve convicts, so perhaps prison patrons are curious how they’re being portrayed in fiction: Do they come across as three-dimensional? Are they ever heroes? Or maybe it’s simpler than that, and they just want to be transported and entertained.

I’ve never been a big mystery reader, although I love the idea of a character dissecting a crime in between brushes with mortality. Long story short, I’m ready for some leads, and prison librarians and/or their probably discerning customers seem like the go-to audience.