Mukherjee and Heron up for double Daggers

Two novels - Abir Mukherjee’s A Rising Man (Harvill Secker) and Mick Heron's Spook Street (John Murray) - have each been shortlisted for two separate Crime Writers Association (CWA) Dagger Awards.

Historical crime novel A Rising Man, which was published by Harvill Secker after winning the Telegraph Harvill Secker crime writing prize, and spy novel Spook Street are both up for the CWA Gold Dagger Award alongside The Beautiful Dead by Belinda Bauer (Bantam Press), Dead Man's Blues by Ray Celestin (Mantle), The Dry by Jane Harper (Little, Brown), and The Girl in Green by Derek B Miller (Faber & Faber).

A Rising Man is also in the running for The CWA Endeavour Historical Dagger. Also shortlisted are The Devil's Feast by M J Carter (Fig Tree), The Ashes of Berlin by Luke McCallin (No Exit Press), The Long Drop by Denise Mina (Harvill Secker), By Gaslight by Steven Price (Point Blank) and The City in Darkness by Michael Russell (Constable).

Meanwhile, Spook Street has also been shortlisted for the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger award alongside You Will Know Me by Megan Abbott (Picador), The Killing Game by J S Carol (Bookouture), We Go Around in the Night and Are Consumed by Fire by Jules Grant (Myriad Editions), Redemption Road by John Hart (Hodder & Stoughton), and The Constant Soldier by William Ryan (Mantle).

Up for the John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger are The Pictures by Guy Bolton (Point Blank), Ragdoll by Daniel Cole (Trapeze), Distress Signals  by Catherine Ryan Howard (Corvus), Sirens by Joseph Knox (Doubleday), Good Me, Bad Me by Ali Land (Michael Joseph), and Tall Oaks by Chris Whitaker (Twenty 7).

The Gold Dagger for Non-Fiction shortlist is: A Dangerous Place by Simon Farquhar (The History Press), Close But No Cigar: A True Story of Prison Life in Castro's Cuba by Stephen Purvis (W&N), The Scholl Case: The Deadly End of a Marriage by Anja Reich-Osang (Text Publishing), The Wicked Boy: The Mystery of a Victorian Child Murderer by Kate Summerscale (Bloomsbury), A Passing Fury: Searching for Justice at the End of World War II by A. T. Williams (Jonathan Cape), or Another Day in the Death of America by Gary Younge (Guardian Faber).

Meanwhile, A Cold Death by Antonio Manzini (translated by Antony Shugaar, Fourth Estate), A Fine Line by Gianrico Carofiglio (translated by Howard Curtis, Bitter Lemon Press), Blood Wedding by Pierre Lemaître, (translated by Frank Wynne, MacLehose Press), Climate of Fear by Fred Vargas, (translated by Siân Reynolds, Harvill Secker), The Dying Detective by Leif G W Persson, (translated by Neil Smith, Doubleday) and The Legacy of the Bones by Delores Redondo (translated by Nick Casiter and Lorenza Garcia, HarperCollins) are up for the CWA International Dagger.

Short stories published by Sphere are strong on the CWA Short Story Dagger shortlist, with “Murder and its Motives” by Martin Edwards, “The Super Recogniser of Vik” by Michael Ridpath and “The Trials of Margaret” by LC Tyler (all from Motives for Murder edited by Martin Edwards (Sphere)) shortlisted for the award. Also shortlisted are “The Assassination” by Leye Adenle and “Snakeskin” by Ovidia Yu from Sunshine Noir edited by Anna-Maria Alfieri and Michael Stanley (White Sun Books), and “What You Were Fighting For” by James Sallis from The Highway Kind edited by Patrick Millikin (Mulholland Books).

Shortlisted for The Debut Dagger (sponsored by Orion), which is awarded for the opening of a crime novel from a writer with no publishing contract, are Strange Fire by Sherry Rankin, The Reincarnation of Himmat Gupte by Neeraj Shah, Lost Boys by Spike Dawkins, Red Haven by Mette McLeod and Broken by Victoria Slotover.

The shortlists were announced at an event at Waterstones Piccadilly last night (26th July).

The winners of all the above CWA Daggers will be announced at the Dagger Awards Gala Dinner to be held at the Grange City Hotel, London on 26th October. Ann Cleeves will be awarded the Diamond Dagger at the same occasion and Mari Hannah will be presented with the Dagger in the Library award. The after-dinner speaker will be Robert Thorogood, creator and writer of TV crime series "Death in Paradise", and master of ceremonies will be crime fiction expert Barry Forshaw.