armchairreviewer

Reprint of the Year Award 2018 – The Results!

After four weeks of canvassing and voting I can now reveal the results for the Reprint of the Year award 2018. For that one person who has missed out on all this fun, information about the awards can be found here. For the list of nominations click here. But for everyone else a quick word about the winner… (before you scroll down the page to find out their name).

I have been watching the poll results day by day so I can say that the winner gained 50% of their votes in the first 24 hours of the poll going live. The remaining 50% came in dribs and drabs, yet no other book remotely caught up with this title. There is a 16 vote gap between 1st and 2nd place.

However, if you can restrain yourselves a little longer I am going to unfold the results in reverse order, looking at the bottom three titles first, before giving the Top 8 results, (it would have been Top 10, but there were so many books tying for 9th and 10th place it would have been less meaningful.

So without further ado here were the three books which received the fewest votes:

And now for the Top 8 titles…

In 8th place are…

In 7th place is…

In 6th place is…

In 5th place is…

In 4th place are…

In 3rd place is…

In 2nd place is…

And with an additional drum roll please, in 1st place with 19% of the vote and winner of the ROY award, (oh I wish I could see everyone’s faces at this point), is…

Bet you didn’t see that coming did you? I know JJ didn’t and he nominated the book! Controversial win? Or did you know this was a sure fire winner all along? Let me know in the comments below.

Whilst I wasn’t surprised to see the three British Library titles in the Top 8, it was good to see a variety of other publishers and imprints in there too and in fairness all the publishers/imprints mentioned deserve a round of applause for their efforts to bring the obscure and unobtainable back into print. I’m not too downcast about my own two nominations not making the Top 8. I was just relieved I wasn’t the only person who voted for them!

Hopefully we will be doing something similar next year, so here’s to a good year in reprinting in 2019!

30 comments

  2. I was not at all surprised . . . particularly as I have seen the ROY statuette, and it bears an astonishing similarity to John Pugmire.

    Congratulations to JJ. All that marshmallow whip will ruin his figure.

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  4. I’m pleased to see ‘Bats in the Belfry’ and ‘The Threefold Cord ‘ in the top three. They are the only two I’ve read! I voted for ‘ The Threefold Cord’. Although ‘Bats’ was fine I thought TTC was outstanding. I really must read some more Francis Vivian.

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  7. Well that is a surprise! Great book, but I thought a fiction title would take it. But it might be a case where everyone cast their first vote for a sure favourite fiction book, then used 2nd or 3rd for this one? (Proportional representation I suppose).
    Astonished and pleased to see one of my choices so high up – though ironically I preferred my other one.

    Well done for organizing, Kate – and I definitely think we should make this an annual event.

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    • Yes I would definitely like to do this again and open to tweaking things or adding new components.
      You did very well Moira getting both your titles into the Top 8. I think Bev was the only other blogger who managed to do this.

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  8. By the way, since 2 books are joint fourth, shouldn’t the book you place at fifth actually be sixth, the book you place at sixth be seventh and so on?

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  9. Victory is ours! Why make a single locked room novel the winner, when you can vote for a book listing over two-thousand impossible crime novels and short stories. Democracy has triumphed today!

    I hope this will prompt some of you to read/review some locked room mysteries in 2019, because we definitely need more locked room reviews… that are not written by JJ and I.

    All the best in 2019!

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    • Hey I reviewed 5 Carr novels this year lol
      I am not against reading locked room mysteries. Just very hard to find the right ones, as for me the writing style and characterisation probably outweigh the impossibility and I have found that LRMs sometimes focus more on the latter rather than the former. Myriad of floor plans and room measurements don’t cut it for me. Another issue is availability as there are some LRM writers I would like to try more by, such as Anthony Wynne, but his work is somewhat tricky to locate. I’m always happy to receive recommendations though.

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      • There are character-driven impossible crime novels without the maps or room measurements. Anthony Gilbert’s The Danger Within (a.k.a. Death in Captivity) and Joan Fleming’s Polly Put the Kettle On immediately spring to mind, but I believe you have already read Gilbert. However, you’ll love Fleming. It came recommended by John Norris (if you need a more credible endorsement).

        Another book you might like is Marcia Muller’s The Tree of Death, which was published in the early eighties and introduces a short-lived series-detective, Elena Oliverez, who’s a museum curator. I believe this is the only time Muller tackled a locked room plot without her husband, Bill Pronzini, but did an excellent job in turning an entire museum into a sealed crime-scene. I think you’ll appreciate her style and characterization.

        Speaking of Pronzini, he wrote a number of hardboiled locked room mysteries: Hoodwink, Scattershot, Bones, Schemers and, together with Muller, The Bughouse Affair and The Spook Lights Affair.

        You might like Helen McCloy’s Mr. Splitfoot and Francis Duncan’s So Pretty a Problem. Duncan is heavy on character, but came up with decent and even somewhat original locked room situation/solution.

        You can reviews of all these titles on my blog and most, if not all of them, are easily available as either cheap paperbacks or ebooks.

        So any more excuses not to read more impossible crime fiction in 2019?

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        • Thanks for the recommendations. I have read the Gilbert novel already as you noted, but not any of the others. I have read two FD novels and they’ve not worked for me. However I have made a note of the Fleming title, (as I have read one by her before), as well as the titles by Muller and McCloy. They sound like they could be my sort of thing.

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    • For your information, TomCat, I am the generally the first one to review an LRI published book at Goodreads. I have also reviewed non-translated Paul Halter novels like La Corde D’argent, La Chambre Du Fou (before its translation),, La Toile De Penelope and La Malediction De Barberousse..

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  15. Having made some waves about the eligibility of The Verdict of Twelve, may I, amidst all the clamour about the winner, point out that, strictly speaking this was not a reprint but a revision and updating of the second edition. Clarification of what constitutes a reprint is needed.

    On another tack, I concur with The Passing Tramp on the best of the Vivians. Having read all ten so far reprinted, I would reckon The Threefold Cord at about third or fourth.

    It was also surprising to see the Melville which must rank as one of the poorer BLCC novels coming so high in the poll.

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