>INTERNATIONAL DAGGER POLLS AND FOCUS ON TRANSLATORS

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Karen of Euro Crime has two polls up here: one asks “who will win the International Dagger?”, and one “who do you want to win the International Dagger?”

These questions may be a bit complicated for us males who can’t multitask, but as soon as I have finished reading the last two nominated books I will be over there to vote.

This is the fourth year of the International Dagger award and it is interesting to see how the translators, those lovely people who bring us non-linguists so many great books, are doing.

Sian Reynolds [translator for Fred Vargas] has four nominations and two daggers.

The team of Amanda Hopkinson and Ros Schwartz [translator for Dominique Manotti] have two nominations and one dagger.

Steven T Murray in his various disguises has four nominations [two for Karin Alvtegen and two for Stieg Larsson], while Stephen Sartarelli [Andrea Camilleri], Don Bartlett [Jo Nesbo] and Marlaine Delargy [Johan Theorin and Asa Larsson] have two each.

Steven T Murray has won the big prize a CWA Gold Dagger in 2001 for Henning Mankell’s Sidetracked in the days before the International Dagger.

Nominations by country are France 6 [including 3 straight wins], Sweden 7, Italy 2, Algeria 2, Norway 2, Denmark, Spain, Switzerland, Iceland one each.

What astonishes me is that so far there has been no German or Dutch book nominated for this prize.

>NEW THE HONEYTONES WEB SITE

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Those of you who were kind enough to vote for the Honeytones in the People’s Millions competition last year might be interested that the group have their own new web site here.

Just click on the info, pix and stuff button and you can read more about the stars of the group. Archived posts about the group and their struggles to perform over the past 18 months are here. [scroll down] And you can read about last year’s vote and get other links here thanks to Petrona.  

The crime fiction connection is that they recently performed for prisoners at Dartmoor Prison. They failed to spot the dreadful Hound of the Baskervilles but they did find a miniature poodle, called Katie.