Minotaur, the mystery imprint of St. Martin's Press, won the two top categories at the Mystery Writers of America's 64th annual Edgar Awards dinner held last night at Manhattan's Grand Hyatt Hotel: Stephanie Pintoff for In the Shadow of Gotham (Best First Novel by an American Author) and John Hart for The Last Child (Best Novel). Another Minotaur author, S.J. Bolton, received the Mary Higgins Clark Award for Awakening, presented the night before at the editors and agents party.
Other winners included Marc Strange for Body Blows (Dundurn) for Best Paperback Original; Dave Cullen for Columbine (Twelve) for Best Fact Crime; and Otto Penzler, the editor of The Lineup: The World's Greatest Crime Writers Tell the Inside Story of Their Greatest Detectives (Little, Brown), for Best Critical/Biographical. On accepting his Edgar, Penzler remarked, "I never knew what pleasure you could get from holding a small bust." Best Short Story went to Luis Alberto Urrea for "Amapola" in Phoenix Noir (Akashic), edited by Patrick Millikin.
Barbara Peters and Robert Rosenwald of Poisoned Pen Press received the Ellery Queen Award, while 86-year-old Dorothy Gilman, best known for her Mrs. Pollifax spy series, was named an MWA Grand Master. Outgoing MWA president Lee Child and incoming MWA president Laura Lippman shared m.c. duties. Child, who's well over six feet tall, got perhaps the biggest chuckle of the evening with his offhand remark that he and diminutive author S.J. Rozan, who was one of the co-presenters for Best Short Story, were twins separated at birth.
