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For over half a century, the Mystery Writers of America has been presenting the Edgar Allan Poe award for Best Novel, but since 1954 (when the first was given to Charlotte Jay for Beat Not the Bones), the winner has only rarely been a book in a language other than English. This is not surprising. One could naturally expect that voters in the MWA would be biased toward their own publishers and colleagues, of course, but the genre of the mystery in all its forms was largely birthed in anglophone cultures; also, there is always the argument that it is hard to judge the literary quality of a book after it has been reshaped through translation.
Nonetheless, a few remarkable novels managed to get nominated as finalists for the Edgar over the years, probably because they altered the way writers thought of the genre, opening up possibilities to make the crime novel fresh. It was not until 1965 that the first translated novel was nominated. Hans Hellmut Kirst's The Night of the Generals did not win, despite its huge success, which led to a major motion picture starring Peter O'Toole and Omar Sharif. In 1971, however, the Swedish couple Per Wahlöö and Maj Sjöwall became the only foreign- language novelists to win a best novel Edgar with The Laughing Policeman. Umberto Eco received an Edgar nomination in 1984 for The Name of the Rose, then, a decade later, Danish author Peter Høeg was nominated for Smilla's Sense of Snow, building on the Scandinavian incursion of Wahlöö and Sjöwall and accelerating what has been called "the Nordic crime wave" (see WLT, Nov. 2009, 9-11). Last year, Swedish author Karin Alvtegen's Missing was nominated.
None of the skilled practitioners of the crime novel in French, such as Georges Simenon, has ever been nominated, despite the strong traditions of crime writing in that country and the deep appreciation of Poe's works. Japan, however, which also has a literature with a strong Poe influence, managed a best novel nomination in 2004 for Out, by Natsuo Kirino. Poe was a great influence on the young Junichiro Tanizaki and other bohemian literary dandies of the early twentieth century, while mystery and detective novels have flourished there at least since Taro Hirai...