Stephen King and Gillian Flynn Win 2015 Edgar Awards

Posted on May 1, 2015

Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King won the 2015 Edgar Award for Best Novel. The 2015 Edgar Allan Poe Awards were announced at a banquet in New York City on April 29th.

King usually writes horror or stories that have some kind of supernatural element. But Mr. Mercedes is a crime novel which focuses on human evil, rather than supernatural. Retired cop Bill Hodges has never gotten over a massacre he could not solve. Someone stole a Mercedes and used it to kill 8 people and wound 15 more. The killer escaped the scene. One day Hodges gets a letter from someone who claims to be the perpetrator and Hodges springs back into action to find the killer before he takes more lives. The book, which was published by Scribner, is going to be made into a limited TV series to be written by David E. Kelley.

King edged out his fellow nominees Wiley Cash (This Dark Road to Mercy), Mo Hayder (Wolf), Stuart Neville (The Final Silence), Ian Rankin (Saints of the Shadow Bible), and Karin Slaughter (Coptown). Ian Rankin tweeted, "Well, on the minus side I didn't win the Edgar Award - some young ruffian called Stephen King did. On the plus side...I got to meet Mr King."

Tom Bouman won Best First Novel for Dry Bones in the Valley. Gillian Flynn won Best Short story for "What Do You Do?". Chris Abani won Best Original Paperback for The Secret History of Las Vegas. Charles Ardai, the editor and founder of Hard Case Crime won the Ellery Queen Award. The Grand Master awards went to Lois Duncan (I Know What You Did Last Summer) and James Ellroy (L.A. Confidential).

You can see the full list of winners here.