A Foreign Country by Charles Cumming was chosen from 40 other entries at the end of the Bloody Scotland event in Stirling.Fans gathered in the city over the weekend for what organisers said is the most popular genre amongst book buyers and library users in Scotland.
Cumming, from Ayrshire, won the £3,000 award for his sixth novel, which is about the disappearance of the first female head of MI6.
He said: "It's a huge honour to win such a prestigious award in the first year of this fantastic festival. My thanks to the judges, to Mazars and to all the organisers - I'm already looking forward to Bloody Scotland 2013."
Sheena McDonald, chair of the judging panel, said: "A Foreign Country by Charles Cumming is far more than a pacy novel with a satisfactory ending. This book is exciting, imaginative and well-written. It doesn't simply tick the crime-fiction boxes - it's simply an outstanding novel."
Best-selling authors like Val McDermid, Ian Rankin, Denise Mina and Christopher Brookmyre held sessions over the three days of the festival. The brainchild of writers Lin Anderson and Alex Gray, the festival opened on Friday with a keynote address from Rebus creator Rankin.
Fife-born writer Val McDermid said she would like to see the festival become a regular occurrence in the crime enthusiasts' calendar.
She said: "I think the time is definitely right. You could quite comfortably fill up an entire festival for a week, not just a weekend, just using Scottish writers doing crime fiction. There is certainly enough of us and enough big names in the Scottish cohort of crime writers for it to be an attractive proposition for audiences."
The 2013 festival is set to be held between September 13 and 15.
Charles Cumming receiving his award at Bloody Scotland.
1 comment:
Many thanks for posting this piece on your blog. Charles is a great friend and ally of mine. We are friends and support and encourage each other's writing careers. His previous novel, THE TRINITY SIX, was partly set in New Zealand. Because Charles was unable to visit our shores, he enlisted me to supervise the New Zealand material.
I was motivated as a reader as much as a writer; I wanted to see a really great contemporary spy novel set here. There hadn't been a decent international thriller set here since Dick Francis's IN THE FRAME and in the spy genre very few novels of note since Ngaio Marsh's COLOUR SCHEME way back in 1943. Charles and I worked hard to bring post-Cold War espionage to Central Otago. (I paid homage to my friend Owen Marshall's 2005 novel DRYBREAD by using Drybread as the setting for THE TRINITY SIX.)
The novel was a big seller overseas and a Washington Post reviewer commented how the narrative even stretched to New Zealand. The genre is popular enough here and I thought New Zealanders would be extra keen to read a top spy thriller set partly in their own backyard. I naively thought this would have made THE TRINITY SIX a dream to promote and sell here. To my frustration, it slipped through the cracks without any publicity. Could I persuade local retailers to promote the New Zealand connection? They showed no interest in drawing their customers attention to it. And when I contacted Harper Collins Auckland office about it, they said they didn't know it was partly set in New Zealand; it seems they don't actually read the novels they distribute. They didn't seem to care. Nobody here knows THE TRINITY SIX exists (a situation that will no doubt still remain until the forth-coming movie version from Universal in a year or two). Nobody is willing to interview Charles about it and I have not encountered a single local review! But you have at least been kind enough to recognise his recent achievement with his new novel, A FOREIGN COUNTRY. It is encouraging and I thank you.
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