Dagger Day, Part the Last: Other random thoughts

Earlier this afternoon, I spoke with John Rickards (calling from the pub, natch) who, in a stroke of luck, sat through the entire ceremony next to James Patterson’s UK publisher. Talk about genius seating arrangements….

No doubt he’ll have more vaguely coherent thoughts on his own blog once he gets over the hangover, but he did pass along some anecdotes:

When Reginald Hill won for the People’s Choice Award (and I’m sorry, but I really do keep conjuring up Hollywood starlets dressed in skimpy gowns. Can’t they change the name or something?) he was following up Jeffery Deaver’s double win and decided to put some fun in his acceptance speech, to the effect of thanking his “best publisher, best agent and best pr in the world. But Jeff Deaver already got those so I will thank the second best.”

Sara Paretsky, on the other hand, opted for a more politically-tinged acceptance speech. Not terribly surprising, considering that BLACKLIST is very much a post-⁹⁄₁₁ novel and that Paretsky is quite a politically outspoken liberal. She took the opportunity to talk about “suppression of freedoms” and to make some pointed remarks about the results of the US election.

Otherwise, the CWA has all their press releases up now, and most interesting is the comments about the Debut Dagger. While Ellen Grubb was the overall winner, Canadian Louise Penny just “missed taking the Debut Dagger by only

a whisker.” Further points in the press release lead me to believe that both are being highly touted to publishers. Time will only tell, of course.

And finally, Fiona weighs in with her thoughts. She’s not quite as upset with how the Gold Dagger turned out as she was last year, but gets the rallying cry going on behalf of Mo Hayder nonetheless.  She also points out something very curious:  “this is the first year in the CWA’s

history that a main Dagger has gone to an author who has already been

awarded the Diamond Lifetime’s Achievement Dagger.”