Murder is Everywhere: "There is Nothin' Like A Dame"

The 2024 Ngaio Marsh Awards finalists; fifteenth edition of Aotearoa New Zealand's
annual prizes for excellence in crime, mystery, thriller, and suspense writing

Craig every second Tuesday

Kia ora and gidday everyone,

From a weatherboard house in the Cashmere Hills in Christchurch, New Zealand, a woman named Ngaio lived an extraordinary life, helping resurrect professional theatre across her country, painting, driving an ambulance during the war and a sleek black Jaguar in peacetime, as well as becoming one of the world's most famous novelists in the interwar years and mid-20th century. A contemporary of Agatha Christie, one of her fellow four Queens of Crime of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction.

Many decades later Dame Ngaio Marsh's murder mysteries are still beloved worldwide, and new generations of Kiwi writers have taken the Dame’s baton and run with it, using tales of crime, mystery, and thrills to provide puzzles and entertainments, while also deeply examining people and place.

Patrick Malahide (left) starring as Marsh's elegant sleuth
in the 1990s BBC adaptation The Inspector Alleyn mysteries

And since 2010, those Kiwi storytellers as determined by some expert international judging panels (often including top critics, university professors, and/or crime writers from UK and Europe, Australia, New Zealand, USA and sometimes elsewhere) to have written the year's crime/thriller novels have been awards with a Ngaio Marsh Award, celebrating both crime writing present and crime writing past.

Last week, the finalists for the fifteenth iteration of the Ngaio Marsh Awards were revealed, across three categories: for Best First Novel, Best Novel, and Best Kids/YA. Given my involvement in the Ngaio Marsh Awards (I helped establish them back in 2010), I was particularly delighted that this year we’re celebrating some of our terrific Kiwi kids’ mystery and thriller writers as a separate category this year, for only the second time in Ngaios history. As I mentioned in a press release:

“Many of us develop our love of reading, and all the benefits that brings us throughout our lives, thanks to children’s authors. In Aotearoa New Zealand we have amazing kids’ authors, across various forms and genres. Moving forward, we hope to award a Best Kids/YA prize biennially, alternating it with our Best Non-Fiction category that has been running since 2017.”

The finalists for the 2024 Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Kids/YA are:

CAGED by Susan Brocker (Scholastic)
KATIPO JOE: WOLF’S LAIR by Brian Falkner (Scholastic)
MIRACLE by Jennifer Lane (Cloud Ink Press)
NIKOLAI’S QUEST by Diane Robinson (Rose & Fern Publishing)
NOR’EAST SWELL by Aaron Topp (One Tree House)

Falkner, an Auckland storyteller now living in Queensland, Australia won the first-ever special award for Best Kids/YA in 2021. Wellington author Jennifer Lane has previously won the Ngaio Marsh Award for Best First Novel for ALL OUR SECRETS, while Bay of Plenty writer Susan Brocker, Auckland author Diane Robinson, and Hawke’s Bay author Aaron Topp are all first-time Ngaio Marsh Awards finalists.

Maori filmmaker and author Michael Bennett, pictured here with
his daughter Matariki, won the 2023 Ngaio for Best First Novel
for BETTER THE BLOOD, an indigenous thriller that's won and
been shortlisted for literary and crime prizes on four continents.

This year’s finalists for the Ngaio Marsh Award for Best First Novel, a prize that in recent years has gone to authors including Jacqueline Bublitz and Michael Bennett, are:

DICE by Claire Baylis (Allen & Unwin)
EL FLAMINGO by Nick Davies (YBK Publishers)
DEVIL’S BREATH by Jill Johnson (Black & White/Bonnier)
A BETTER CLASS OF CRIMINAL by Cristian Kelly
MAMI SUZUKI: PRIVATE EYE by Simon Rowe (Penguin SEA)

From madcap Latin American capers to an unexpected Japanese sleuth, a neurodivergent expert on toxic botanicals to an ex-detective and a legal researcher each harnessing real-life expertise in captivating tales, the 2024 Ngaio Marsh Award finalists for Best First Novel introduce some exciting fresh voices to the #yeahnoir whanau (Kiwi crime, mystery, and thriller writing family).

Given that several people in the New Zealand literary community/books world questioned - understandably perhaps - how sustainable annual prizes for local crime, mystery, and thriller writing would be, back when we began in 2010, it's been very heartening to see some amazing new voices come through each year, from a variety of larger and smaller publishers, and self-published authors.

Past Ngaios Best First Novel finalist Nathan Blackwell (second from left)
onstage at Newcastle Noir with Kiwi crime queen Vanda Symon, Australian
authors Rachel Amphlett and Helen Fitzgerald, and myself in 2019

In much the same way that Scottish crime fiction is much more than heavyweight international bestsellers and living legends like Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, and Denise Mina, with several dozen entrants each year and more than 100 first-time crime writers joining the ranks in recent years, 'Yeahnoir', or Kiwi crime and thriller writing, continues to grow and diversify. I'm really thankful we no longer rely on a strong but small group of outstanding storytellers to fly the flag, so to speak.

Lastly, the finalists for this year’s Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Novel are:

DICE by Claire Baylis (Allen & Unwin)
THE CARETAKER by Gabriel Bergmoser (HarperCollins)
RITUAL OF FIRE by DV Bishop (Macmillan)
PET by Catherine Chidgey (Te Herenga Waka University Press)
DEVIL’S BREATH by Jill Johnson (Black & White/Bonnier)
GOING ZERO by Anthony McCarten (Macmillan)
EXPECTANT by Vanda Symon (Orenda Books)

While not all of the names and books will be familiar to overseas readers, it's an exceptionally strong group of finalists to emerge from a dazzlingly varied field. To put it in some context: one of the longlistees to miss out on being a 2024 finalist was a highly regarded climate change thriller from a Booker Prize winning author. Between them, this septet of authors have already won and been nominated/shortlisted for a wide range of storytelling prizes including the Women's Prize, CWA Daggers, BAFTAs and Oscars for screenwriting, Barry Awards, the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the Dublin Literary Award, featured on BBC's Between the Covers, and more. So known or not, there's a heck of a lot of writing talent in this crew. Another really tough decision for the judges, too.

Literary dames: Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh
hanging out at a London function together

As I noted in the official press release last week, crime writing is a broad church nowadays, including but going beyond traditional murder mysteries and whodunnits in the style of Dames Ngaio and Agatha Christie, to deliver insights about society and humanity alongside rollicking reads. And as the likes of Val McDermid have said, if you want to better understand a place, read its crime fiction. Many of our finalists hold up a mirror to society, taking readers into varied lives through their stories, alongside page-turning entertainment.

The 2024 Ngaio Marsh Awards finalists will be celebrated and this year’s winners announced at a special event held at the WORD Christchurch Festival next week on Wednesday, 28 August, a few kilometres down the road from Dame Ngaio's house in the Cashmere Hills.

Whakataukī of the fortnight:

Inspired by Zoe and her 'word of the week', I'll be ending my fortnightly posts by sharing a whakataukī (Māori proverb), a pithy and poetic thought to mull on as we go through life.

“Kia whakatōmuri te haere whakamua.”

(I walk backwards into the future with my eyes fixed on my past)