The Diamond Dagger

Well, it's been quite a twenty-four hours. Since the news was announced that I'm this year's recipient of the CWA Diamond Dagger, I've been inundated with generous messages. Literally hundreds of them. As if the joy of receiving the highest honour in UK crime writing were not enough, receiving the good wishes of so many kind people from all over the world has been truly humbling.

I'm still processing it all, to be honest, but I thought I'd just reflect on a conversation that I had many years ago - I'd guess it was 1996 or 1997 - with a dear friend, the late Reginald Hill. He'd recently won the Diamond Dagger himself, and was asked by the CWA to form a sub-committee which would put forward suitable candidates for the Diamond Dagger from the plethora of nominations submitted by CWA members - a sort of "quality control" process.  

So Reg rang me up and said he didn't really like committees, but thought that if I joined him, the two of us could treat the exercise seriously, but also as an excuse for a chat and a gossip. He'd become something of a mentor to me, and wrote a lovely and characteristically witty introduction to an early collection of my short stories.

He knew of my intense love of the crime genre, and he said that, having won the Diamond Dagger himself, he wanted us to ensure that standards were maintained. He also said that he felt that as I wasn't going to be a candidate for the next few years, I could contribute my opinions with an open mind. And then he added that he believed that one day I would follow in his footsteps and receive the award. This struck me as extraordinary, not merely because I'd only written five or six books at this point, but also because he simply wasn't the sort of person who would volunteer such a thing without meaning it; he certainly wasn't given to casual flattery. Smart guy as he was, though, I couldn't believe that his forecast would come true. 

For a number of years Reg and I submitted shortlists of candidates for the award to the committee and we did indeed have some very enjoyable chats along the way. (The usual process is essentially this: nominations are submitted by CWA members; a dedicated sub-committee produces a shortlist of say half a dozen, perhaps up to ten, candidates; and then the CWA committee decides.) That original conversation with Reg has stuck in my mind but I must say that even though my name began to feature occasionally in nominations, I continued not to believe it would happen. Now that it has, I'm very happy about it. And I'd like to think that Reg would be happy too.