US debut writer wins gold dagger at UK's top crime writing awards

First-time American novelist Bill Beverly has won the Crime Writers’ Association’s Gold Dagger for the best crime novel of the year. Beverly’s Dodgers, about a man who works for an LA drugs organisation and who is sent to assassinate a judge in Wisconsin by his boss, beat Christopher Brookmyre’s award-winning novel Black Widow, as well as titles by Denise Mina and Mick Herron,

to win the CWA’s top prize last night. Beverly, who teaches American literature and writing in Washington DC’s Trinity University, and who turned his research on criminal fugitives into the book On the Lam, is a first-time novelist, and also won the CWA’s John Creasey New Blood Dagger, for the best debut crime novel, last night.

 Dodgers by Bill Beverly book cover

The Guardian called Dodgers “a mashup of rite of passage and road trip, with the four main characters at odds not only with each other, but also with a country that is entirely alien to them”. Main character East, “at once world-weary and naive”, is “heartbreakingly believable”, said the paper’s review.

Last night’s ceremony also saw the Diamond Dagger, for “a career’s outstanding contribution to crime fiction”, go to Peter James, the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger for the best thriller of the year go to Don Winslow’s The Cartel, and the International Dagger for crime fiction translated into English go to Pierre Lemaître’s The Great Swindle, translated by Frank Wynne.