Paula L. Woods (born 1953 in Los Angeles [1] ) is an African-American crime novelist and literary critic. Her 1999 novel, Inner City Blues , won the Macavity Award for best first mystery, [2] and was followed by other novels featuring its heroine, L.A. policewoman Charlotte Justice. She has also edited an anthology of African-American crime literature and co-edited (with Felix H. Liddell) three anthologies of African American literature illustrated with African American fine art.
Robert Crais is an American author of detective fiction. Crais began his career writing scripts for television shows such as Hill Street Blues, Cagney & Lacey, Quincy, Miami Vice and L.A. Law. His writing is influenced by Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Ernest Hemingway, Robert B. Parker and John Steinbeck. Crais has won numerous awards for his crime novels. Lee Child has cited him in interviews as one of his favourite American crime writers. The novels of Robert Crais have been published in 62 countries and are bestsellers around the world. Robert Crais received the Ross Macdonald Literary Award in 2006 and was named Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America in 2014.
Loren D. Estleman is an American writer of detective and Western fiction. He is known for a series of crime novels featuring the investigator Amos Walker.
Ken Bruen is an Irish writer of hard-boiled and noir crime fiction.
Jan Burke is an American author of novels and short stories. She is a winner of the Edgar Award for Best Novel, the Agatha for Best Short Story, the Macavity, and Ellery Queen Readers Award.
Bill Pronzini is an American writer of detective fiction. He is also an active anthologist, having compiled more than 100 collections, most of which focus on mystery, western, and science fiction short stories. Pronzini is known as the creator of the San Francisco-based Nameless Detective, who starred in over 40 books from the early 1970s into the 2000s.
A Place of Execution is a crime novel by Val McDermid, first published in 1999. The novel won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the 2001 Dilys Award, was shortlisted for both the Gold Dagger and the Edgar Award, and was chosen by The New York Times as one of the most notable books of the year.
Margaret Maron was an American writer, the author of award-winning mystery novels.
Kenneth Martin Edwards is a British crime novelist, whose work has won multiple awards in the UK and the United States. As a crime fiction critic and historian, and also in his career as a solicitor, he has written non-fiction books and many articles. He is the current President of the Detection Club and in 2020 was awarded the Crime Writers' Association's Diamond Dagger, the highest honour in British crime writing, in recognition of the "sustained excellence" of his work in the genre.
The Macavity Awards, established in 1987, are a literary award for mystery writers. Nominated and voted upon annually by the members of the Mystery Readers International, the award is named for the "mystery cat" of T. S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. The award is given in four categories—best novel, best first novel, best nonfiction, and best short story. The Sue Feder Historical Mystery has been given in conjunction with the Macavity Awards.
Nancy Pickard is an American crime novelist. She has won five Macavity Awards, four Agatha Awards, an Anthony Award, and a Shamus Award. She is the only author to win all four awards. She also served on the board of directors of the Mystery Writers of America. She received a degree in journalism from the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri and began writing when she was 35 years old.
Leslie S. Klinger is an American attorney and writer. He is a noted literary editor and annotator of classic genre fiction, including the Sherlock Holmes stories and the novels Dracula, Frankenstein, and Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as well as Neil Gaiman's The Sandman comics, Alan Moore's and Dave Gibbons's graphic novel Watchmen, the stories of H.P. Lovecraft, and Neil Gaiman's American Gods.
Kelli Stanley is an American author of mystery-thrillers. The majority of her published fiction is written in the genres of historical crime fiction and noir. Her best known work, the Miranda Corbie series, is set in San Francisco, her adoptive hometown.
Jane K. Cleland is a contemporary American author of mystery fiction. She is the author of the Josie Prescott Antiques Mysteries, a traditional mystery series set in New Hampshire and featuring antiques appraiser Josie Prescott, as well as books and articles about the craft of writing. Cleland has been nominated for and has won numerous awards for her writing.
Inner City Blues is the 1999 debut novel by American crime author Paula L. Woods, and the first book in her Charlotte Justice series. The book was published by W. W. Norton & Company on 17 January 1999, winning the Macavity Award for Best First Mystery in 2000 and being named Best First Novel by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association.
Sharan Newman is an American historian and writer of historical novels. She won the Macavity Award for Best First Mystery in 1994.
Art Taylor is an American short story writer, book critic and an English professor.
Rebecca Cantrell is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author. She has published nine novels in over ten different languages. Her novels have won the ITW Thriller, the Macavity, and the Bruce Alexander awards. They have been nominated for the GoodReads Choice award, the Barry, the RT Reviewers Choice, and the APPY award. She and her husband and son live in Berlin.
Paul D. Marks was an American novelist and short story writer. His novel White Heat, a mystery-thriller set during the Rodney King riots of 1992, won the first Shamus Award for Independent Private Eye Novel from the Private Eye Writers of America.
Susan Dunlap is an American writer of mystery novels and short stories. Her novels have mostly appeared in one of four series, each with its own sleuthing protagonist: Vejay Haskell, Jill Smith, Kiernan O'Shaughnessy, or Darcy Lott. Through 2020, more than two dozen of Dunlap's book-length mysteries have appeared in print. She has also edited crime fiction and has contributed to anthologies, including A Woman's Eye (1991), and to periodicals such as Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine. Her short story "Checkout" won a Macavity Award and an Anthony Award in 1994.
Jim Fusilli is is an American journalist, essayist and novelist. He served as the rock-and-pop critic for The Wall Street Journal from 2009 to 2018, and contributed to NPR’s All Things Considered. He has written nine novels and is also the author of the Pet Sounds entry in Bloomsbury Publishing’s 33 1/3 series.