2025 Anthony award for Best Anthology: Tales of Music, Murder and Mayhem

Tales That Linger in Your Mind and Take up Residency in Your Soul (NYT)

Our crime fiction columnist assesses three riveting new novels and an emotionally devastating short-story collection. (Published November 12, 2021)

MIDNIGHT HOUR (Crooked Lane, 321 pp., paper, $16.99), edited by Abby L. Vandiver (previously reviewed here under her pseudonym, Abby Collette), presents 20 stories by authors of color. “They are voices that will linger long in your mind. Take up residency in your soul. Add a new, extra dimension to your peripheral vision and continue to walk just beneath the surface of your skin,” Stephen Mack Jones writes in his introduction.

The stories, by the likes of Tracy Clark, Raquel V. Reyes and David Heska Wanbli Weiden, reflect the breadth and depth of talent among this crime-writing cohort.

There are more hits than misses. Two stories stand out in particular: Faye Snowden’s “Chefs,” which evokes James M. Cain’s tone and Stanley Ellin’s fiendish mind; and “The Search for Eric Garcia,” by E.A. Aymar, equal parts formally inventive and emotionally devastating. Vandiver has assembled a group of writers whose careers I will eagerly follow.

First Ever Effie Lee Morris Writing Awards & Mixer

The Women’s National Book Association San Francisco Chapter is pleased and proud to debut the first-ever Effie Lee Morris WNBA Literary Awards in honor of our founder. 

Ms. Morris was a pioneering Black librarian and the founder of this chapter of the Women’s National Book Association in 1968. She first started her library career in Cleveland, Ohio. She became the first female chairperson of the Library of Congress and was the president of the National Braille Association for two terms. She was dedicated to literacy for children as well as children in underserved and those who learn differently.  Ms. Morris was the first Coordinator of Children’s Services at the San Francisco Public Library and established the Children’s Historical and Research Collection at the Children’s Center of the San Francisco Library.  She went on to become the first African American president of the Public Library Association. In 1968, Ms. Morris founded the San Francisco Chapter of the Woman’s National Book Association, which began in 1917.  The WNBA SF Chapter is continuing our advocacy for the voices of women and diverse authors.

In tribute to Ms. Morris’s important work and legacy, we are announcing the first winners of the Effie Lee Morris WNBA Literary award.

The WNBA SF chapter received many wonderful entries in the genres of fiction, creative non-fiction, and poetry. With the help of judges specializing in each genre, we found first, second, and third place winners for each genre. 

• First Place: Butterfly Girl by Anne Marie O’Brien
  Annemarie O’Brien grew up in Northampton, Massachusetts, and now lives in the San Francisco Bay area where she teaches writing courses at UC Berkeley Extension, Stanford Continuing Studies, and Pixar. She is known for writing dog books for children, especially her book Lara’s Gift.
• Second Place: The Mounted Position by Vera Chan
  Vera Chan is a senior manager at Microsoft News Labs and storyteller based in Oakland and Seattle. She has worked as a senior editor/trends reporter for Yahoo! and did her newspaper stint covering features, entertainment and outdoor living at the Contra Costa Times (now The East Bay Times). She has contributed chapters to Asia in the San Francisco Bay Area and Martial Arts of the World: An Encyclopedia of History and Innovation and won the Sisters in Crime award for a mystery-in-progress for an unpublished writer of color (now a finished manuscript, FOLLOWING.)
• Third Place: Someone Else by Harriet Garfinkle
  Harriet Garfinkle is an award-winning painter, dancer, and choreographer who danced professionally in San Francisco. She has choreographed the original play “Purple Breasts” and has her own experimental theatre group called The Bureau of Western Mythology and dance group TALLGIRLS. She teaches Pilates and is currently working her way through a novel.

Sisters in Crime is pleased to announce the winner of the Eleanor Taylor Bland Crime Fiction Writers of Color Award — Vera H-C Chan.

Winner Vera H-C Chan has worked in the world of newspapers, magazines and the Web, including nearly nine years as a senior editor and Web trends analyst at Yahoo! and currently working with news publishers at Microsoft. While her byline has appeared in hundreds of news, features and entertainment stories in print and online, Vera has labored on side literary projects. A lifelong lover of mysteries, she’s a fan of old-school authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, G.K. Chesterton and Dashiell Hammett, Her entry for the Eleanor Taylor Bland Award features an unlikely and somewhat surly, female, Chinese-American “private investigator” who is tasked — thanks to her restaurateur father — to look into cases of seemingly wayward Asian-American children.

In addition to the Brenna Hom series, Vera — a black belt in a Korean martial art — is currently shopping a full-length humor novel based on a quiet and hapless tech writer who enters the world of martial arts, full of mischief, mayhem and machismo. She lives in the SF Bay Area with her husband and his long-lived parrot Hemingway, who tolerates her presence. You can find on twitter @fasttalkingd and the web https://verahcchan.com/.

About Eleanor Taylor Bland

Eleanor Taylor Bland was a pioneer in crime fiction. Dead Time, published In 1992 and first in a 13-book series, introduced African American police detective Marti MacAlister, a widowed mother who lived and worked in a Chicago suburb that closely resembled Bland’s adopted hometown of Waukegan. Each title in the series highlighted social problems of the time. Bland also published several works of short crime fiction and edited a collection titled Shades of Black: Crime and Mystery Stories by African-American Authors (2004). When she passed away in 2010, she was one of the most prolific African American authors in the genre. With Marti MacAlister, Bland created an enduring and much beloved heroine who went against the grain of perpetuated stereotypes related to African American women in much of U.S. popular culture.

Although Bland focused primarily in her work on stories about African American characters and their lives, bringing both complexities and comforts of familiarity to her readership, she also included in-depth interactions with other kinds of characters that reflect the broad spectrum of identities that is U.S. society. Bland saw crime fiction as an especially accessible literary vehicle for bringing into the genre characters that before her work had been peripheral to or simply missing from the genre. She understood that crime fiction could continue over time broadening its appeal to new reading audiences by opening its doors to the kinds of characters, societal situations and perspectives, and potential for creativity that authors of color would bring.

Additional details about the rules and selection process are described on the Eleanor Taylor Bland Crime Fiction Writers of Color award announcement.