Annal:1994 Hammett Prize for Crime-Writing
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Hammett Prize in the year 1994. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Dixie City Jam: A Dave Robicheaux Novel
- 1994 Hammett winner
- Score: 10.44
They’re out there, under the salt—the bodies of German seamen who used to lie in wait at the mouth of the Mississippi for unescorted American tankers sailing from the oil refineries of Baton Rouge out into the Gulf of Mexico. As a child, Dave Robicheaux had been haunted by the sailors’ images; then, as a young college student, he’d accidentally discovered one of their subs while scuba diving. Years later, in a New Orleans populated by desperate hustlers and millennium-watchers of all stripes, Robicheaux, a detective with the New Iberia sheriff’s office, finds…
- 1994 Hammett nominee
- Score: 6.44
A tale of malevolence and violence set in rural West Virginia, the locale Benedict has made his own, dogs of god tells of Tannhauser, a crazed backwoodsman turned tyrannical drug lord, and the odd cast of characters—gun runners, federal agents, corrupt cops, local eccentrics, drifters—enticed into his destructive orbit. Innocently into their midst comes a young man called Goody, whose reputation as a formidable amateur boxer pits him against one of Tannhauser’s goons in a bare-fisted boxing match—a fight that Goody realizes too late will require more than just a…
- 1994 LATimes–Biography winner
- 1994 NBCC–Biography winner
- 1994 Hammett nominee
- Score: 26.44
Gary Gilmore, the infamous murderer immortalized by Norman Mailer in The Executioner’s Song, campaigned for his own death and was executed by firing squad in 1977. Writer Mikal Gilmore is his younger brother. In Shot in the Heart, he tells the stunning story of their wildly dysfunctional family: their mother, a blacksheep daughter of unforgiving Mormon farmers; their father, a drunk, thief, and con man. It was a family destroyed by a multigenerational history of child abuse, alcoholism, crime, adultery, and murder. Mikal, burdened with the guilt of…
Third and Indiana: A Novel
- 1994 Hammett nominee
- Score: 6.44
Someone is painting bodies on Philadelphia’s Broad Streetone more boldly drawn chalk outline every time another life is lost to the violence of the drug wars. A sixteen-year-old dealer; a priest; a nine-year-old girl. The images pile through the summer and fall, moving closer each day to the doorstep of City Hall.
Ofelia Santoro rides her bicycle over the bodies and through the dark, decaying streets of the neighborhood known to police as the Badlands. She is looking for her fourteen-year-old son, Gabriel, who disappeared a month earlier. His father skipped…
- 1994 Hammett nominee
- Score: 6.44
When beautiful, wealthy Yukiko and low-born artist Noriyoshi are found drowned together in a shinju, or ritual double suicide, everyone believes the culprit was forbidden love. Everyone but newly appointed yoriki Sano Ichiro.
Despite the official verdict and warnings from his superiors, the shogun’s Most Honorable Investigator of Events, Situations, and People suspects the deaths weren’t just a tragedy—they were murder. Risking his family’s good name and his own life, Sano will search for a killer across every level of society—determined to find…
