Crime Line-up Revealed at
Harrogate Crime Writing Festival:

Shortlists Announced for Three Book Categories in the
Specsavers Crime Thriller Awards 2010

Completely Integrated Crime Thriller Screen and Retail Season Launches in August

London, Friday, 23rd July, 2010—Specsavers, Cactus TV and ITV3, in partnership with the Crime Writers’ Association (CWA), are pleased to announce three key book shortlists for the Specsavers Crime Thriller Awards on ITV3, celebrating the very best of British and International crime thriller fiction in the UK and beyond. 

The content of ITV3’s brand new Crime Thriller Season of accompanying documentaries is also announced today at the Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate, Yorkshire.

The shortlisted categories revealed today are the CWA Gold Dagger for the Best Crime Novel of the Year; the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger for the Best Thriller of the Year; and the CWA John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger for the Best New Crime Writer of the Year, awarded in memory of CWA founder John Creasey:

CWA GOLD DAGGER 2010
o    Blacklands, Belinda Bauer (Corgi)
o    Blood Harvest, S J Bolton (Bantam Press)
o    Conman, Richard Asplin (No Exit Press)
o    Rain Gods, James Lee Burke (Orion)
o    Shadowplay, Karen Campbell (Hodder & Stoughton)
o    The Strange Case of the Composer and his Judge, Patricia Duncker (Bloomsbury)
o    Still Midnight, Denise Mina (Orion)
o    The Way Home, George Pelecanos (Orion)

CWA IAN FLEMING STEEL DAGGER 2010, SPONSORED BY IAN FLEMING PUBLICATIONS LTD
o    61 Hours, Lee Child (Bantam Press)
o    A Loyal Spy, Simon Conway (Hodder & Stoughton)
o    Gone, Mo Hayder (Bantam Press)
o    Slow Horses, Mick Herron (Robinson)
o    The Dying Light, Henry Porter (Orion)
o    Innocent, Scott Turow (Macmillan)
o    The Gentlemen’s Hour, Don Winslow (Heinemann)

CWA JOHN CREASEY (NEW BLOOD) DAGGER 2010
o    Acts of Violence, Ryan David Jahn (Pan)
o    Cut Short, Leigh Russell (No Exit Press)
o    Martyr, Rory Clements (John Murray)
o    Random, Craig Robertson (Simon & Schuster)
o    Stop Me, Richard Jay Parker (Allison & Busby)
o    Rupture, Simon Lelic (Picador)
o    The Holy Thief, William Ryan (Mantle )
o    The Pull of the Moon, Diane Janes (Robinson)

The finalists in each category will be announced on Monday 9th August to coincide with the launch of the completely integrated Crime Thriller promotional period which will see posters and stickered books in shops and supermarkets, coverage in the press, and trailers on ITV1 and ITV3. The initiative has the support of leading publishers and highstreet retailers and is now well established as a major industry-wide event.

Richard Holmes, Specsavers Group Marketing Director, says: “Last year’s Crime Thriller Awards were a great success and we are very proud at Specsavers to be able to play a small part in bringing this genre to the public. I’ll certainly be catching up on my reading of the shortlisted titles and waiting in suspense to find out more.”

Forming the basis of the official Specsavers Crime Thriller Season, ITV3 will start a six-week run of brand new crime and thriller documentaries on Tuesday 31st August. These hour-long documentaries will focus on TV’s greatest detectives and showcase the shortlisted books in the other categories.

In this major new TV campaign, in the six weeks leading up to The Specsavers Crime Thriller Awards 2010, the British public will get the chance to vote for their favourite TV detective of all time. Over the six-week season of documentaries on ITV3, twelve different fictional detectives will be profiled - each of them a nominee for ‘The People’s Detective’ Dagger, which will be presented at The Specsavers Crime Thriller Awards.

Drawing extensively on archive from ITV’s impressive crime thriller back catalogue, each profile show will feature two of the nation’s best-loved TV detectives.  The series examines the detectives’ quirks and foibles, meets their sidekicks, re-visits their most challenging cases and re-lives their greatest triumphs, in addition to revealing behind-the-scenes stories and anecdotes.  Linking these memorable on-screen moments, will be newly filmed interviews with the stars of the nation’s favourite crime thriller dramas, the creators of TV’s biggest screen sleuths, and their famous fans.