Last night the 2010 Edgar Allen Poe Awards were announced in New York City. The Edgars recognize the best in mystery fiction, non-fiction and television published or produced in 2009.
The Last Child by John Hart took top honors for best novel. No surprise there. Who wouldn’t want to read about the “lineal descendant and spiritual soul mate of Huck Finn and Holden Caulfield“?
Dave Cullen’s Columbine—which has “the immediacy and starkness of a documentary“—won an Edgar for Best Fact Crime.
Several BookPage editors were pleased that Mary Downing Hahn won for Closed for the Season (“Best Juvenile”). Hahn wrote Tallassee Higgins, one of my childhood favorites, and many others. In September, watch for Hahn’s new book The Ghost of Crutchfield Hall.
Click here to view the complete list of Edgar winners. For an interesting analysis on why Edgar winners don’t typically win more than once, read this article in the Wall Street Journal.
What’s the best mystery you read in 2009?
“In the Woods” by Tana French.
Cullen , who first reported on the story for the online magazine Salon, acknowledges in the book’s source notes that thoughts he attributes to Klebold and Harris are conjecture gleaned from the record the pair left behind.
Jeff Kass takes a more straightforward approach in “Columbine: A True Crime Story,” working backward from the events of the fateful day.
The Denver Post
Mr. Cullen insists that the killers enjoyed “far more friends than the average adolescent,” with Harris in particular being a regular Casanova who “on the ultimate high school scorecard . . . outscored much of the football team.” The author’s footnotes do not reveal how he knows this; when I asked him about it while preparing this review, Mr. Cullen said he did not necessarily mean to imply that Harris was sexually active. But what else would such words mean?
“Eric and Dylan never had any girlfriends,” the more sober Mr. Kass writes, and were “probably virgins upon death.”
Wall Street Journal