Author refuses Mail on Sunday book prize because of its xenophobia towards refugees

The John Llewellyn Rhys prize has previously been won by Jonathan Coe and Angela Carter. So it was indeed a great honour for Hari Kunzru to be shortlisted for this venerable prize, which is sponsored by the Mail on Sunday. However, being the child of an emigrant, he felt that the sponsors had done more than their share of stirring up hatred against refugees. And on the night, when he was announced as the winner, in his absense, his agent made the very public gesture of refusing the “honour” and requesting the Mail on Sunday to donate the £5000 prize to the Refugee Council, which they agreed to do.

For a statement by Hari Kunzru - follow this link

Amazon’s new text-search facility / browser

Amazon.com recently launched a new program which enables anyone to peruse parts of books, before buying, or even not buying as the case may be. Called “Search Inside” it enables customers or researchers to search the text of the 120,000 books they currently have on the online inventory. Such a facility will be a boon to researchers / writers, who have a vague memory of reading somewhere about something but need to find the data for bibliographical and /or clarification purposes: by inputting a phrase or couple of words into the Amazon search engine, there is a very good chance of locating exactly what it is they require.

And that is a lot easier than browsing through lots of books in the hope of finding what is required.

Ed McBain's 87th Precinct
from Macbuiks

Ed McBain was born Salvatore A. Lombino in New York in 1926 and started writing novels after a period as an enlisted seaman in the navy during the Second World War.

Ed McBain is one of the most illustrious names in crime fiction. In 1998 he was a first non-British author to be awarded the Crime Writers' Association Diamond Dagger Award. He is also a holder of the Mystery Writers of America's coveted Grand Master Award.

Prolific both as Ed McBain and Evan Hunter he is probably best known for his novels written about the 87th Precinct, although he is responsible for another series of crime stories about private eye/attorney 'Matthew Hope', as well as eleven collections of short stories. In addition to these two pseudonyms, Lombino has also written as John Abbott, Curt Cannon, Hunt Collins, Ezra Hanson and Richard Marston. A successful writer for television and cinema whose credits include the screen play for Alfred Hitchcock's 'The Birds', he also wrote a memoir of the time he spent working with Alfred Hitchcock called 'Me and Hitch'.

The first 87th Precinct novel 'Cop Hater' was written in 1956 and since then McBain has written fifty more, all set in the fictional city of Isola . It is in 'Cop Hater' that the reader is first introduced to Steve Carella and his first meeting with his future wife Teddy. While there were 16 detectives assigned to the 87th precinct, the reader only gets to know of a chosen few, amongst them Meyer Meyer, Bert Kling and Andy Parker.

Ed Mcbain is able to put flesh on the bones of his characters by detailing their personal problems and their joys, to make them come alive, to make you care what happens to them. Lying in bed reading, you can feel the biting cold of the Isola streets when the detectives are called to the scene of a murder, late at night. At the same time, he keeps up the tension of a criminal investigation with all its inherent dangers.

The full list of all 87th Precinct titles is as follows:

Full details about Ed McBain, his pseudonyms and books can be found at the official Ed McBain website