Barbara Nadel casts a spell over the CWA Dagger judges…

When my Inspector Ikmen novel DEADLY WEB won the Crime Writers’ Association Silver Dagger for Fiction in November 2005, no-one was more surprised than me. Why did it win? Maybe having a magician in the plot had an effect upon the outcome.

Stage magic is about making fantastical things happen through illusion and sleight of hand. There is always, I believe, part of the human mind that is open to the possibility that the illusory could be real. Maybe a spell had been cast on the judges? Then again they could simply have liked my novel! I still can’t believe that I have won one of the coveted crime fiction daggers. The last time I won anything was at school – first prize in a raffle which turned out to be a bottle of cheap perfume well past its sell-by date. I treasured that dreadful bottle for years.

Little bits of magic can be found in most of my Ikmen novels. Çetin Ikmen himself possesses a level of intuition that could be described as second sight. In DANCE WITH DEATH (Paperback, June 2006), he meets people who believe in the existence of fairies during his sojourn into the district of Cappadocia which is in the heart of rural Turkey. DANCE WITH DEATH continues the debate started in DEADLY WEB about what is and is not real. It is something that I believe, fascinates all of us – and that includes very eminent panels of literary judges. Mind you I think I’ll just go and look at that dagger for a bit now, check that I haven’t made some sort of dreadful reality error...

 
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