The Cut from the First Thirteen Years
The Scarlet Stiletto Awards: 13 years, 1495 entries, 468 shortlisted short stories, 13 trophy winners, 91 category awards, 65 special commendations.
Why do we Sisters in Crime do it, every year? More importantly - with so many wonderful tales of murder, mystery, mayhem, revenge, justice and just deserts - how did we autopsy such a body of writing to choose just 26 stories for this First Cut?
Obviously the Scarlet Stiletto winners - 13 First Prize stories by only nine women - survived the first incision. Further probing, however, told us that some suspects kept turning up in other categories in different years. Second prize winners had won the Malice Domestic; many repeat offenders in the Special Commendation file had escalated to Third Prize or Police Procedural; and some, on serial writing sprees, had turned to a life of Verse or, disturbingly, tried to perpetrate the Funniest Crime.
The final line-up reveals evidence of the twisted, the nefarious, the dark and the sinister; but mostly exposes the guilty pleasure of the perfectly executed crime… story.
It also explains why we Sisters keep doing it - we simply love crime fiction.
Our investigation into the Scarlet Stiletto Award archives also raised one last question: Why do so many women out there want to get away with murder?