If you have come across the recently released mystery award nomination lists, your eyes do not deceive you. Two mysteries sharing a title and a dark comic style are both in the running for major awards.
Head Games by Craig McDonald has been nominated for an Anthony Award in the Best First Novel category and Head Games by Thomas B. Cavanagh has been nominated for a Shamus Award in the Best Hardcover category.
In McDonald’s book, which begins in 1957, we meet one Hector Lassiter, a larger-than-life crime writer who knew Hammett and Chandler, and the cast of characters includes Orson Welles, Marlene Dietrich, Jack Webb and a young Yale frat boy and gone-missing Texas National Guardsman named “George W.”
When an old pal sets Pancho Villa's head on the table of a cantina in the Mexican desert, Lassiter is up for an adventure: delivering the head to Senator Prescott Bush (father of 41, grandfather of 43) so that it can be used in secret ceremonies at Yale's Skull and Bones Society.
A bit of backstory: In 1916 Woodrow Wilson had dispatched Black Jack Pershing and an army of 10,000 into Mexico to find and bring back Pancho Villa — dead or alive. Villa evaded capture, living in comfort and peace until his assassination in 1923. A short time later, an unknown person (or persons) dug up his body and stole his head.
McDonald’s second Lassiter mystery, Toros & Torsos, is due out this month.
Spanning the years from 1935 to 1959, it involves a serial killer who arranges dead bodies to resemble surrealistic art, Ernest Hemingway, Orson Welles (again), and actual events including the Key West hurricane of 1935, the Spanish Civil War and Cuba's last days before Castro. Whew!
In Cavanagh’s book, retired police detective Mike Garrity doesn’t have a lot to live for. What he does have are two ex-wives, a fifteen-year-old daughter who hates him, and a soon-to-be-fatal brain tumor nicknamed Bob.
An old colleague shows up and offers him a chance to go out with a bang, leave his daughter with an inheritance and a chance to earn her respect. TJ Sommerset, a member of a hit boy band – who is the idol of Mike’s daughter – has gone missing, putting at risk a world tour and millions in endorsements. It isn't long, however, before Mike discovers that there are other people looking for TJ as well and when a headless corpse shows up, it’s clear that they’re not just after him for his autograph.
This is the second Garrity mystery. The series opener was the riveting Murderland, which is about a serial killer stalking tourists at a popular Florida theme park.
The third book in the series is the recently released Prodigal Son. With his cancer in remission after undergoing surgery to remove his tumor, Garrity takes on a case on behalf of a member of his cancer support group, who asks him to help track down the son she had put up for adoption twenty years earlier, but soon finds his search complicated by his client's disappearance and murder.
The full nomination lists for the Anthony, Macavity, and Shamus Awards are available on-line.
They will be given out during the Bouchercon 2008 “Charmed to Death” Conference in Baltimore (Charm City) this coming October. Laura Lippman, author of the Baltimore based Tess Monaghan mystery series, will be this year’s Guest of Honor.
She is in the running for both the Anthony and Macavity Best Novel Award for What the Dead Know.
