The harrowing realities of jury trials, fiery revenge in Renaissance Florence and a miraculous smalltown girl scooped 2024 Ngaio Marsh Awards from a dazzling array of finalists in Christchurch.
Crime and thriller novels, one of the world’s most-popular genres, are often discussed in terms of their puzzling mysteries, high-stakes action, or twisting finales. But at the WORD Christchurch Festival, it was a trio featuring memorable characters under extreme pressure that were celebrated as winners of the 2024 Ngaio Marsh Awards.
“Cesare Aldo is a gay man at a time and place in history where that sexuality is punishable, potentially by death, depending on the circumstances,” said former Herald journalist DV Bishop, speaking by video about his third mystery Ritual of Fire, set in Renaissance Florence.
“Though he enforces the law, he’s also on the wrong side of the law as far as the law is concerned… So Aldo believes in justice much more than he believes in the rule of law, which makes him a really interesting, multi-faceted character to work with and to write.”
Bishop was one of several 2024 finalists to be “interrogated” during the Ngaio Marsh Awards evening, either in person or by video, by “Bookshop Detectives” Louise and Gareth Ward. With the audience and several finalists (prime suspects) across three categories – Best Kids/YA Book, Best First Novel, Best Novel – in the library setting of Tūranga, it was the sort of classic mystery denouement that may have appealed to Dame Ngaio herself.
But despite Bishop’s lengthy storytelling resume, ranging across many years from comics and graphic novels to radio plays and TV dramas for the BBC, to licensed tie-in novels for Doctor Who and Judge Dredd, he didn’t see last night’s twist coming. Bishop was flabbergasted to learn Ritual of Fire had won the 2024 Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Novel.
The international judging panel praised Bishop for vividly evoking the glorious but menacing Medici-era Florence, with “convincing historical detail seamlessly woven into a terrific story that captures attention throughout” and crafting great characters.
“Oh gosh, that’s completely unexpected,” he said from his home near a medieval market town in Scotland. “Wow, I’m delighted, and amazed, frankly, because the standard of the books on the longlist this year, let alone among the finalists, was incredible.”
A historical mystery in which court officer Cesare Aldo is banished to the Tuscan countryside, leaving his protégé Strocchi to investigate the murders of rich merchants burned to death in disturbing echoes of a religious sect, Ritual of Fire emerged from a group of Best Novel finalists the international judging panel described as “dazzling” in their quality and diversity.
Fellow finalists included Brighton-based Māori storyteller Jill Johnson’s Devil’s Breath, a first mystery starring neurodivergent professor of botanical toxicology Eustacia Rose, and the long-awaited return of Detective Sam Shephard in Dunedin author and Traitors NZ star Vanda Symon’s Expectant.
Two-time Acorn Prize for Fiction winner Catherine Chidgey was also in the running with her “stunning, beautifully written” psychological thriller Pet, as was Oscar-nominated Kiwi screenwriter Anthony McCarten for terrifying high-tech thriller Going Zero, which explores mass surveillance in a ticking-clock contest gone horribly wrong. Kiwi-born Melbourne writer Gabriel Bergmoser was praised for his “tense and breath-stealing” thriller The Caretaker, while former law lecturer Claire Baylis offered readers a jury-eyed view of sexual assault trials and our criminal justice system in “devastating” debut Dice.
Moments before Bishop was named Best Novel winner, dual finalist Baylis received the 2024 Ngaio Marsh Award for Best First Novel for Dice, a compelling courtroom drama and exploration of how sexual violence is viewed in our society, told through the eyes of 12 jurors. A grab-bag of ordinary citizens forced into the harsh coalface of our criminal justice system, weighing facts and accounts through the prism of various beliefs and prejudices.
In Dice, four teenage boys are on trial for a variety of offences after inventing a sex game based on rolling dice and doing what the numbers said in relation to three teenage girls. Twelve jurors, aged from 18 to 72 and coming from hugely varying backgrounds, beliefs and experiences, must decide whether any crimes were committed, and who should be punished.
“The fictionalised account of the case at hand is both timely, in light of local cases such as the ‘Roast Busters’ and numerous overseas examples, and sensitively handled in its presentation of victims and accused, allies and officials, and the everyday people as fish out of water,” said the judges.
“There is so much clever and surprising about Dice and how it is told. I don’t think a New Zealand novelist has made a better structural or narrative choice than its conclusion, or realised an idea with such emotional force, in recent reading.”
The daughter of former Listener editor Geoff Baylis, Baylis had always wanted to write novels but instead studied law at Victoria University, then lecturing there for 12 years, before moving to Rotorua and becoming a researcher on the trans-Tasman Jury Research project. This gave Baylis a rare opportunity to attend trials and then interview jurors about the cases, and a unique insight into the issues jurors face and how they reach their decisions.
Eventually her writing and legal passions blended into a PhD in creative writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters at Te Herenga Waka University, where Baylis worked on Dice alongside academic research into the novel’s themes.
Baylis’s triumph and joy was a scene with plenty of echoes for Wellington author Jennifer Lane, who won the same award at WORD Christchurch Festival in 2018, for her debut All Our Secrets, which like Baylis’s first novel had a long gestation of many years.
This year, Lane found herself onstage once more, making history as the winner of Best Kids/YA Book for Miracle, a smalltown mystery starring a bullied 14-year-old girl who is struggling to deal with a series of devastating events, and trying to clear her father’s name after he’s arrested for a brutal attack.
“Poignant and funny,” said the judges. “A strong sense of family permeates Lane’s tale, with a complex storyline and memorable, well-developed characters including a fascinating heroine with her authentic adolescent voice.”
By winning her second Ngaio Marsh Award, Lane joins a rare group of local storytellers to have multiple Ngaios, alongside Paul Cleave, Jacqueline Bublitz and Michael Bennett.
This year’s awards are only the second time there has been a special award for excellence in crime, mystery, thriller, or suspense writing for children and young adults.
Lane’s fellow 2024 finalist Brian Falkner, a Kiwi storyteller based in Queensland, had won the first-ever Best Kids/YA prize in 2021 for Katipo Joe: Blitzkrieg, the first in his trilogy about a young Kiwi tasked with infiltrating Nazi Germany during the war.
The other Best Kids/YA finalists this year were Auckland author and accountant Diane Robinson for Nikolai’s Quest, a tale of a brother and sister in a Russian orphanage searching for the truth about their family, Hawke’s Bay teacher turned author Aaron Topp for Nor’East Swell, a YA tale that meshes mystery and thrills with surfing and mental health, and Tauranga writer Susan Brocker for Caged, which features a teenager from a homeless family getting entangled with a dangerous criminal network and trying to save abused dogs.
The Ngaio Marsh Awards hope to present a Best Kids/YA prize every two years, alternating with the biennial Best Non-Fiction Award that’s been running since 2017.
