THE SUPREME ACCOLADE for crime fiction has its origins in the Crossed Red Herrings Award, invented for the Crime Writers' Association in 1955 by John Creasey, whose centenary falls this year. Winston Graham won the first award. Five years later it was renamed the CWA Gold Dagger for Fiction.

Sponsors have come and gone over the decades, but in 2006 Duncan Lawrie, the private bank, stepped in with greatly increased prize-money. Now worth £20,000, the dagger is the richest crime-writing prize in the world.

Winning can have an amazing effect on any writer's life. When Val McDermid was awarded the dagger for The Mermaids Singing in 1995, her career boomed. Ian Rankin got it for Black & Blue in 1997 and he told me that his sales increased by a factor of ten. Along with these twin giants, the rest of the dagger winners make up an impressive list. Almost all of the great names are here: Lionel Davidson, John le Carré (twice), Dick Francis, Eric Ambler, Ruth Rendell (four times), Minette Walters, Reginald Hill, James Lee Burke and others.

There are one or two surprising exceptions, but the judges work independently of the CWA and the sponsors, and their brief is to give the dagger to the best novel of the year, not to the writer whose backlist, reputation or sales are the most impressive.

Years ago, when I was involved in administering the award, I had the uncomfortable job of going on Radio 4's Front Row to defend an almost all-male, almost all-American shortlist that had me privately spitting with rage. Every year arguments and complaints boom as soon as the list has been announced. I wouldn't have had 2008's exactly like this if I had been the sole arbiter. But it is a good one.

James Lee Burke
The Tin Roof Blowdown
Orion, £7.99 Buy the book here

Hurricane Katrina and its terrible aftermath provide the core of James Lee Burke's best novel for years. In spite of his often splendid writing, I have found aspects of his exploration of the pains and traumas of masculinity irksome in the past. But the tragedy of New Orleans is different.

He has created a confusing number of characters and subplots to reproduce the chaos left by the hurricane and the inadequate official response. The stress of extreme experience breaks open every shell, and true character emerges when the weak and wicked grab their opportunities. As Lee Burke puts it: “Ordinary men and women keep track of time in sequential fashion, by use of clocks and calendars. The residents of Gethsemane do not. Here are a few of their stories, each of them touching, in an improbable way, the life of a New Iberia kid, who grew up to be a good man...

Colin Cotterill
The Coroner's Lunch
Quercus, £6.99 Buy the book here

Colin Cotterill's novel features Siri, a 70-year-old reluctant coroner in Vientiane, in a literate, quirky tale that combines the charm of Alexander McCall Smith's Bostwanan outings with harder-edged crime. There is torture here and people die violently. Pain hurts. Death is hard. And the living suffer.

The story begins with three corpses at the bottom of a lake, where they “swayed gently back and forth in the current and entertained the fish and algae that fed on them like diners at a slow-moving noodle stall.”

The coroner is a great character: kind, thoughtful, and irreverent. He is also more or less rational, though subject to instructive visitations from the ghosts of the dead, who lead him towards the correct solution to his mysteries.
Much as I liked him and enjoyed Cotterill's vivid images, I found the novel surprisingly easy to put down.

Frances Fyfield
Blood From Stone
Little, Brown, £19.99 Buy the book here

Frances Fyfield's experience as a prosecuting solicitor must have acquainted her with the nastiest possible human behaviour. She specialises in unhappiness and has a knack of picking a troubling episode from the news and transforming it to fit into her imaginative world. Some years ago it was a woman police officer more or less destroyed by participating in a honey trap that failed to prove a suspected murderer's guilt. This time it's a successful professional woman who throws herself from the window of an expensive London hotel.

She is Marianne Shearer, a barrister, who has just achieved a not-guilty verdict for a sadist, whose greatest pleasure came from the humiliation of his victim. The explanation of exactly what he did and why Shearer jumped is a perfect example of Fyfield's work: beautifully written, cold, and emotionally brutal.

Steve Hamilton
Night Work
Orion, £18.99 Buy the book here

A probation officer with a troubled background and tragedy in his past is trying to move his life on in Steve Hamilton's warm, involving novel. His fiancée was murdered two years ago; now a new girlfriend is strangled on waste ground near his apartment. More women with whom he has had contact are killed. His memory of relevant events is faulty. Evidence is found of his presence at each crime scene. The police ask increasingly threatening questions before pulling him in.

Joe Trumble thus becomes sleuth as well as suspect, scouring his past and professional files for clues to what is happening. As he revisits old clients and their parents, and the families of other clients' victims, he faces uncomfortable aspects of the fight between good and bad. The final lengthy confrontation between killer and one last potential victim desperately hoping for rescue engaged me less than the rest.

Laura Lippman
What The Dead Know
Orion, £6.99 Buy the book here

Laura Lippman has a way of depicting peculiar families with such clarity and sympathy that she throws light on far more conventional relationships. This time her focus is on the battles between sisters.

Thirty years ago two girls aged 15 and 11 disappeared. Now a woman who has illegally left the scene of a minor car accident in Baltimore claims to have been Heather, the younger of the two. She tantalises the authorities - and the reader - with a continuous trickle of information about the day the sisters disappeared and what was done to them. No one believes her.

Switching between many points of view and several different periods, the narrative raises ever more complex questions. Lippman continually heightens the tension without any savagery, while exploring the nature of family relationships. This is an impressive and engaging novel.

R. N. Morri
A Vengeful Longing
Faber, £12.99 Buy the book here

Borrowing Porfiry Petrovich from Dostoevesky's Crime and Punishment, R.N. Morris has set this serial-killer novel in St Petersburg in the summer of 1868. A heatwave exacerbates the effects of useless sanitation, producing not only a stink but also an outbreak of cholera.

Two victims die in the first scene, an effective evocation of place, character and a whole range of powerful emotions. The dead are a mother and her only son, who would now be described as having special needs. Her husband is the obvious suspect and therefore clearly innocent. Petrovich and his sidekick, Virginski, must pick their way through stench and grotesque poverty to home in on the right man.

A little over-impressed with its own cleverness, this is nevertheless well-researched. It is written with a detached formality that makes a good foil to the forward-thinking tolerance of its sleuth.

The official shortlist announcement will take place at the British Library on Tuesday June 3. The winner is announced on July 10.

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