Using Award Lists As a RA Tool: Edgar Awards Edition

This is part of my ongoing series on using Awards Lists as a RA tool. Click here for all posts in the series in reverse chronological order. Click here for the first post which outlines the details how to use awards lists as a RA tool.

The Mystery Writers of America have announced the nominees of the 2024 Edgar Awards here. These are awards for Mystery and Crime, Fiction and Nonfiction, as well as television, all produced in 2023.

The Edgar awards are an EXCELLENT resource, for all of the reasons I normally discuss [see link in the intro], but also because 3 of their awards are straight up readalike awards-- The Mary Higgins Clark Award, the Lillian Jackson Braun Award, and the Sue Grafton Memorial Award. I rely on these awards to help fans of these authors find new titles and authors.

The Edgar Awards also have a WONDERFUL database of past winners and nominees. You can easily search back 78 years [!] and because mysteries are so popular in our libraries, there are endless display and suggestion possibilities held in that database. You can search by category, author, year, basically anyway you might want to look for titles, they have you covered.

Explore the database for yourself.

The range of titles as usual is large and the options are all great suggestions for a wide range of readers. Take just the "Best Novel" category as our example:

BEST NOVEL

• Flags on the Bayou by James Lee Burke (Grove Atlantic – Atlantic Monthly Press)
• All the Sinners Bleed by S.A. Cosby (Flatiron Books)
• The Madwomen of Paris by Jennifer Cody Epstein (Penguin Random House – Ballantine Books)
• Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll (Simon & Schuster – Simon Element – Marysue Rucci Books)
• An Honest Man by Michael Koryta (Hachette Book Group – Little, Brown and Company – Mulholland Books)
• The River We Remember by William Kent Krueger (Simon & Schuster – Atria Books)
• Crook Manifesto by Colson Whitehead (Penguin Random House – Doubleday)

We have well known crime fiction names, the biggest new star in the genre,SA Cosby, 2 newer female voices to this category, and one of America's most beloved literary fiction authors, Colson Whitehead, all on this one list.

You want a snapshot of the "mystery" landscape, one of our most popular areas for library checkouts, look no further than the Edgar Awards nominees this year, well any year really, and especially over the last 5 years. You can track trends, rising star authors, and key reedlike titles with just a click or two. 

Click here or on the image below to access the full color, PDF press release for this year's nominees.

Explore all nominees in a PDF