Every Winner of the Anthony Award for Best Novel, Assembled For Your Crime Reading Pleasure

Every year, crime and mystery lovers from around the world gather at the literary summit known as Bouchercon. The convention / conference / mystery extravaganza is named in honor of Anthony Boucher, the famed writer, editor, and critic, a longtime champion of crime fiction in his regular columns for the New York Times Book Review, among other outlets, and also a founder of the Mystery Writers of America. As part of the week’s festivities, the several thousands in attendance at Bouchercon vote on the year’s best mystery achievements. Those honors, appropriately enough, are named the Anthony Awards, another nod to the convention’s patron saint. (You can find a full list of the nominees here, and the nominees’ roundtable discussion on “the state of crime fiction” right here at CrimeReads.) While there are many fine categories in competition at the Anthonys, a glance at the contenders for the annual “best novel” prize offers up an especially interesting snapshot of what’s happening in the world of crime fiction. The award has been running now for thirty-three years, so we decided to look back at every winner of the category to see how things have evolved these last decades.

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The big takeaways? Private eyes have been largely supplanted by law enforcement, except in Baltimore; crime has moved off the coasts; and women have always run the game. A few authors stand out for their Anthony wins, and sure enough, they’re the genres giants. Louise Penny has won the big award five times, the most of any author, with an especially impressive streak from 2010 – 2013. Michael Connelly and Laura Lippman have each won the prize four times, and William Kent Krueger and the late Sue Grafton are right on their heels, with three wins a piece. (Lippman has a good chance of moving into a tie for the lead—she’s nominated for best novel again this year, for Sunburn.) That’s an awfully impressive gang of crime authors, and it’s just the start.

Take a look through the rest of the winners below and see what trends you can spot, which books you want to read or re-read, and make a few predictions for the winners still to come. Check back here in the coming days for more from Bouchercon and the Anthony Awards.

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