How the Edgar Award For Best Novel Was Decided

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Just past 10:30 p.m. on Thursday April 27, in the darkened hall on the fifth floor of the Marriott Marquis Hotel on Times Square, the Edgar Award for Best Novel was announced.  I sat with several of the other Best Novel judges a few yards away from where Danya Kukafka, author of Notes on an Execution, spent the evening among friends waiting to hear if she had won.  When her book was announced from the distant podium, she jumped up and was enthusiastically hugged and congratulated before making her way to the podium where she gave a brief acceptance speech.

The novel braids together alternating narratives of a killer, his victims, and the upstate New York detective whose dogged pursuit of justice leads to his arrest. As the jacket cover says, it is a work of literary suspense that deconstructs the story of a serial killer on death row.  Kukafka’s said in her remarks that the power of crime fiction is that it can address moral questions not available to readers in other literary forms. 

For those of us who judged the Best Novel category, the evening culminated a sixteen-month process in which we evaluated 517 novels, finally picking a winner among the six finalists.   Kukafka, the 77th winner of the Edgar Best Novel award, joined a winner’s circle that includes Walter Mosley, Raymond Chandler, John Le Carré, Stephen King, Eric Ambler and many whose names are no longer well known.  

I volunteered to be a candidate to judge the award in late 2021.  A month later, Jamie Mason, the chief judge, invited me to join the committee.  “It’s a huge undertaking,” she wrote in an email, “but also an incredible opportunity to take in an entire year’s worth of our genre for a rare comprehensive look at what’s going on in our little corner of the writing world.”

Novels started to arrive to at my home in early January 2022 and would continue to do so at an alarming rate for the next ten months.  I quickly determined that to keep my head above water, I needed a system for evaluating the novels without reading every page. I was told there were no guidelines for evaluating a book except one – to qualify, a novel needed to have a crime.  

A few things surprised me during my year of judging, among them: It was easy to identify a mediocre book and hard to choose one excellent book over another.  In the end, our diverse group of judges cast a wide net.  We were three men and four women, and among the seven, two were writers of color.  We each submitted a ranked list (1 to 12) of finalists, and of the 84 named books, only 23 titles were common to at least one list, and 61 titles were only on one judge’s list.  This was not a surprise given the diversity of the seven judges and the powerful gravity of individual taste.    

Each of us developed an approach to sorting through the heavy volume of books.  “Prose had to have personality,” one judge said in our zoom meeting at the end of the process.  Most books had serviceable prose, some were excellent stories with serviceable prose, but serviceable prose didn’t qualify a novel to win the Edgar Award for Best Novel.  

A book had to continue to prove its quality to keep each of us reading to the end.  There were several reasons to stop reading and put a book in the ‘maybe’ or ‘reject’ pile.  One judge read the first sentence and said, ‘absolutely not.’  Another found an egregious mistake of geography, another a wrongly described car. Errors of description and sloppy prose could tip a judge against a book that was already failing to impress.  

I judged the books on three criteria: writing, story, character.  If a book was well written, the characters interesting, and the story unfolded well, I continued to read until the voice flagged, the story became tired, or the plot strayed.  I read ten pages of every book, two dozen of most, and every page of a reasonable number.    

The 517 novels represented pretty much all crime novels published by major publishers and prominent independents, but it didn’t matter who the publisher was: derivative and hackneyed works were easy to spot, as was originality when it surfaced, and there were common themes and settings in a fair number of novels.  

Several books featured the sudden appearance of a body during a bachelorette party on a Greek island; dim memories of a dark childhood trauma became the plot device for revenge crimes; half a dozen novels featured down-on-their-luck Los Angeles private detectives solving crimes of passion; a few well-written spy novels were set in Cold War Berlin; many novels started with a prologue. 

Elmore Leonard famously admonished writers to avoid adverbs and prologues and I have always taken his advice to heart, so when I opened a book and found a prologue, I tended to read over the prologue in the belief that if a fact is worth revealing, or an incident worth foreshadowing, it should be in the first chapter.  None of the six finalists has a prologue. 

The finalists have very little in common, except for empathetic protagonists, a crime, and excellent writing that pulls the reader into the story: a gift for just the right word to illuminate a mood or describe a detail.   All start with short provocative sentences:

The Devil Takes You Home: “Leukemia.”

Gangland: “Cop detail’s watching the house – I shoulda warned you.”

The Maid: “I am well aware that my name is ridiculous.”

Devil House: “Mom called yesterday to ask if I was ready to come home.”

Like a Sister: “I found out my sister was back in New York from Instagram.”

Notes on an Execution: “You are a fingerprint.”

The awards process required selection of one Best Novel, but that singular outcome masks the excellence of the other novels.  

Dwight Garner in the New York Times said of John Darnielle’s book: “Devil House is terrific: confident, creepy, a powerful and soulful page-turner. I had no idea where it was going, in the best possible sense.”

Daniel Olivas writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books, said: “The Devil Takes You Home inarguably establishes Gabino Iglesias as one of our most innovative, exhilarating, and gifted novelists who, once again, blends genres with exquisitely dark, compelling, and provocative results. This novel takes no prisoners.”

Reviewer Katie Kitamura, who selected Notes on an Execution as a New York Times Editor’s Choice, said: “Defiantly populated with living women . . . beautifully drawn, dense with detail and specificity . . . Notes on an Execution is nuanced, ambitious and compelling.” 

The New York Times Book Review called Chuck Hogan’s Gangland ‘masterly,’ and similar high praise went to Nita Prose’s The Maid (“Think page-turner,” Glamour) and Kellye Garrett’s Like a Sister (“a briskly plotted, socially astute new thriller,” The Los Angeles Times).

The night’s other big winner of the Best Novel category was Michael Pietsch, CEO, Hachette, which published half the finalists, and Joshua Kendall, editorial director at Hachette Book Group’s Mulholland imprint, who had two authors among the six finalists.   

My own list of favorites included novels by Joe Kanon, Mick Herron, Charles Cumming, Dan Fesperman, and Lawrence Osborne, each of whom published superb books in 2022.  

At the end of the evening, I introduced myself to Kukafka.  I told her that I was familiar with Tupper Lake, the small town in the Adirondacks where much of the book is set, having spent many summers there, and the book perfectly captures the small town’s grim mix of hope and hopelessness.

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