Science Fiction Awards Watch is reporting that Jedediah Berry is the winner of this year’s William L. Crawford Award, for his novel The Manual of Detection The award, which will be presented at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts this March, is for a new fantasy writer whose first book appeared the previous year.
The nominators for this year’s award also shortlisted:
A Book of Endings by Deborah Biancotti (collection)
Living with Ghosts by Kari Sperring
The Girl with Glass Feet by Ali Shaw
The nominators also “commend two other authors whose works were ineligible this year but were highly regarded: Robert V.S. Redick, whose The Red Wolf Conspiracy appeared in 2008 and whose The Ruling Sea appears in 2010, and Michal Ajvaz, whose The Other City originally appeared in Czech in 1993 but was first translated into English, by Gerald Turner, in 2009.”
The nominators this year included: Amelia Beamer, John Clute, Kelly Link, Niall Harrison, Farah Mendlesohn, Cheryl Morgan, Graham Sleight, Jonathan Strahan, Liza Trombi, and Paul Witcover.
The Manual of Dectection takes place “in an unnamed city always slick with rain, [where] Charles Unwin toils as a clerk at a huge, imperious detective agency. All he knows about solving mysteries comes from the reports he’s filed for the illustrious detective Travis Sivart. When Sivart goes missing and his supervisor turns up murdered, Unwin is suddenly promoted to detective, a rank for which he lacks both the skills and the stomach. His only guidance comes from his new assistant, who would be perfect if she weren’t so sleepy, and from the pithy yet profound Manual of Detection (think The Art of War as told to Damon Runyon).
“Unwin mounts his search for Sivart, but is soon framed for murder, pursued by goons and gunmen, and confounded by the infamous femme fatale Cleo Greenwood. Meanwhile, strange and troubling questions proliferate: why does the mummy at the Municipal Museum have modern-day dental work? Where have all the city’s alarm clocks gone? Why is Unwin’s copy of the manual missing Chapter 18?
“When he discovers that Sivart’s greatest cases—including the Three Deaths of Colonel Baker and the Man Who Stole November 12th—were solved incorrectly, Unwin must enter the dreams of a murdered man and face a criminal mastermind bent on total control of a slumbering city.”