Archive Collection
Edgar Award for Best Novel Winners
1954–2026
The Edgar Award for Best Novel is the most prestigious honour in crime and mystery writing, presented since 1954 by the Mystery Writers of America. Named for Edgar Allan Poe, it has recognised masters of suspense from John le Carré and Dick Francis to Ruth Rendell and James Lee Burke.
About the Edgar Award for Best Novel
- Awarded by
- Mystery Writers of America
- First awarded
- 1946
- Country
- United States
- Winner receives
- A ceramic bust of Edgar Allan Poe
When it is announced
Announced at the Edgar Awards banquet in the spring, usually late April or May, after nominations in January. See the full announcement calendar.
How to enter
Publishers submit crime and mystery titles published in the United States during the previous year.
Official prize site · Checked August 2026. Dates move year to year, so confirm on the official site before entering.
| Year | Title & Author | Historical Context |
|---|---|---|
| 2026 | The Big Empty | The Big Empty won the Edgar for Best Novel in 2026, and the award closed one of the genre's longest arcs: Robert Crais, a Grand Master since 2014,… |
| 2025 | The In Crowd | The In Crowd won the Edgar for Best Novel in 2025, the second Caius Beauchamp novel taking the American prize and anointing one of British crime's… |
| 2024 | Flags on the Bayou | Flags on the Bayou won the Edgar for Best Novel in 2024, and the arithmetic made the ceremony: James Lee Burke was eighty seven, collecting his third… |
| 2023 | Notes on an Execution | Notes on an Execution won the Edgar for Best Novel in 2023, and its win was read as the genre grading its own homework: the book's explicit argument,… |
| 2022 | Five Decembers | Five Decembers won the Edgar for Best Novel in 2022, and its publishing story was part of the romance: the book appeared from Hard Case Crime, the… |
| 2021 | Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line | Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line won the Edgar for Best Novel in 2021, a landmark winner on several axes at once: a debut, set in an Indian basti,… |
| 2020 | The Stranger Diaries | The Stranger Diaries won the Edgar for Best Novel in 2020, the American prize crossing to a British writer the US market barely knew: Elly Griffiths… |
| 2019 | Down the River Unto the Sea | Down the River Unto the Sea won the Edgar for Best Novel in 2019, and the timing had a ceremonial rightness: Walter Mosley had received the MWA's… |
| 2018 | Bluebird, Bluebird | Bluebird, Bluebird won the Edgar for Best Novel in 2018 and the Anthony with it, and its arrival was generational: Attica Locke, already an Edgar… |
| 2017 | Before the Fall | Before the Fall won the Edgar for Best Novel in 2017, the crime establishment crowning a showrunner: Noah Hawley was mid run as the creator of… |
| 2016 | Let Me Die in His Footsteps | Let Me Die in His Footsteps won the Edgar for Best Novel in 2016, confirming the fastest ascent the award had seen from its own farm system: Lori… |
| 2015 | Mr. Mercedes | Mr. Mercedes won the Edgar for Best Novel in 2015, Stephen King's first, the genre's official prize arriving four decades into one of the most… |
| 2014 | Ordinary Grace | Ordinary Grace won the Edgar for Best Novel in 2014 and became that rarity, an award winner that kept selling for a decade: word of mouth, book clubs… |
| 2013 | Live by Night | Live by Night won the Edgar for Best Novel in 2013, Dennis Lehane collecting the genre's top prize at the exact point his career had outgrown… |
| 2012 | Gone | Gone won the Edgar for Best Novel in 2012, beating a shortlist that included Keigo Higashino's The Devotion of Suspect X, and it brought the award to… |
| 2011 | The Lock Artist | The Lock Artist won the Edgar for Best Novel in 2011, beating a shortlist that included Tana French and Harlan Coben, and it marked Steve Hamilton's… |
| 2010 | The Last Child | The Last Child won the Edgar for Best Novel in 2010, completing John Hart's consecutive books double, no other writer has won the top prize with back… |
| 2009 | Blue Heaven | Blue Heaven won the Edgar for Best Novel in 2009, C. J. Box stepping outside his Joe Pickett game warden series, already the reigning franchise of… |
| 2008 | Down River | Down River won the Edgar for Best Novel in 2008, the second novel of a Salisbury, North Carolina lawyer turned writer whose debut, The King of Lies,… |
| 2007 | The Janissary Tree | The Janissary Tree won the Edgar for Best Novel in 2007, an unusual reach for the award, a first mystery set in the nineteenth century Ottoman court,… |
| 2006 | Citizen Vince | Citizen Vince won the Edgar for Best Novel in 2006, the genre prize catching Jess Walter mid metamorphosis: a Spokane journalist who had written the… |
| 2005 | California Girl | California Girl won the Edgar for Best Novel in 2005, making T. Jefferson Parker a double winner within four years after Silent Joe took the prize in… |
| 2004 | Resurrection Men | Resurrection Men won the Edgar for Best Novel in 2004, the American prize arriving thirteen books into the Rebus series and serving as the US… |
| 2003 | Winter and Night | Winter and Night won the Edgar for Best Novel in 2003, the summit of S. J. Rozan's Lydia Chin and Bill Smith series, whose structural gimmick,… |
| 2002 | Silent Joe | Silent Joe won the Edgar for Best Novel in 2002, the first of T. Jefferson Parker's pair, and marked the full arrival of the writer who had been… |
| 2001 | The Bottoms | The Bottoms won the Edgar for Best Novel in 2001, the mainstream coronation of Joe R. Lansdale, who had spent two decades as East Texas's genre… |
| 2000 | Bones | Bones won the Edgar for Best Novel in 2000, the breakout of Jan Burke's Irene Kelly series, seven books of Southern California newspaper procedural… |
| 1999 | Mr. White's Confession | Mr. White's Confession won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1999, one of the award's clearest statements that the category belongs to novels about crime… |
| 1998 | Cimarron Rose | Cimarron Rose won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1998, making James Lee Burke a two time winner eight years after Black Cherry Blues, and the pairing… |
| 1997 | The Chatham School Affair | The Chatham School Affair won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1997, the crown of Thomas H. Cook's particular franchise: the retrospective tragedy, a form… |
| 1996 | Come to Grief | Come to Grief won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1996, completing a treble: Dick Francis's third Best Novel Edgar, at the time the only writer with… |
| 1995 | The Red Scream | The Red Scream won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1995, the centre of a remarkable three book run: Mary Willis Walker's debut had taken the Agatha, this… |
| 1994 | The Sculptress | The Sculptress won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1994 along with a Macavity, completing a treble no other crime writer had matched, major prizes for… |
| 1993 | Bootlegger's Daughter | Bootlegger's Daughter won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1993 and then kept going: the Agatha, the Anthony and the Macavity followed, the first novel to… |
| 1992 | A Dance at the Slaughterhouse | A Dance at the Slaughterhouse won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1992, the crown of the Scudder sequence's great middle period: the previous entry, A… |
| 1991 | New Orleans Mourning | New Orleans Mourning won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1991, and the statistic travelled with the news: Julie Smith was the first American woman to… |
| 1990 | Black Cherry Blues | Black Cherry Blues won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1990, the third Robicheaux novel completing the series' arrival: James Lee Burke had spent two… |
| 1989 | A Cold Red Sunrise | A Cold Red Sunrise won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1989, the fifth Rostnikov novel and the series' international breakthrough, arriving with perfect… |
| 1988 | Old Bones | Old Bones won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1988 and fixed the Gideon Oliver series, then four books old, as the genre's forensic anthropology… |
| 1987 | A Dark-Adapted Eye | A Dark-Adapted Eye won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1987, and its byline was the year's open secret: Barbara Vine was Ruth Rendell, the reigning queen… |
| 1986 | The Suspect | The Suspect won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1986, the first Canadian novel ever to take the award, a distinction the country's crime writers still… |
| 1985 | Briarpatch | Briarpatch won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1985, the second for Ross Thomas, whose 1967 debut The Cold War Swap had taken the first novel prize, and… |
| 1984 | LaBrava | LaBrava won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1984, the establishment catching Elmore Leonard at the exact moment the culture did: after decades of… |
| 1983 | Billingsgate Shoal | Billingsgate Shoal won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1983, a first mystery by a college English professor, and the choice drew the customary murmurs,… |
| 1982 | Peregrine | Peregrine won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1982, and its detective outlived its falcon: Frank Janek returned in Switch, whose premise, two victims'… |
| 1981 | Whip Hand | Whip Hand won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1981 and the CWA Gold Dagger for 1979, the first book to take the top American and British crime prizes… |
| 1980 | The Rheingold Route | The Rheingold Route was published by Harper and Row in 1979 and won the Edgar Award for Best Novel in 1980. It was also nominated for a National Book… |
| 1979 | Eye of the Needle | Eye of the Needle won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1979 and sold in the millions, the breakout that turned Ken Follett from a young London publishing… |
| 1978 | Catch Me: Kill Me | Catch Me: Kill Me won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1978, one of the award's genuine dark horse choices: William H. Hallahan was a Philadelphia… |
| 1977 | Promised Land | Promised Land won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1977, and the prize functioned as an anointing: Robert B. Parker, an English professor whose doctoral… |
| 1976 | Hopscotch | Hopscotch won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1976, its timing impeccable: published as the Church Committee was dragging the CIA's secrets into… |
| 1975 | Peter's Pence | Peter's Pence won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1975, the second Australian winner of the American prize, twenty one years after Charlotte Jay's… |
| 1974 | Dance Hall of the Dead | Dance Hall of the Dead won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1974, the American establishment's early embrace of what Tony Hillerman was building: the… |
| 1973 | The Lingala Code | The Lingala Code won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1973, and it remains the list's great obscurity: an early novel by Warren Kiefer, drawn from his… |
| 1972 | The Day of the Jackal | The Day of the Jackal won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1972 and sold in the millions, a first novel written in thirty five days by a flat broke former… |
| 1971 | The Laughing Policeman | The Laughing Policeman won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1971, the first novel in translation ever to take the award, an American prize crowning the… |
| 1970 | Forfeit | Forfeit won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1970, the first of an eventual three for Dick Francis, a total James Lee Burke has since equalled, and the… |
| 1969 | A Case of Need | A Case of Need won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1969, awarded to Jeffery Hudson, a pseudonym concealing a Harvard Medical School student named Michael… |
| 1968 | God Save the Mark | God Save the Mark won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1968, the only best novel Edgar of Donald E. Westlake's career, a statistic the genre treats as its… |
| 1967 | The King of the Rainy Country | King of the Rainy Country won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1967, confirming the arrival of Nicolas Freeling's Van der Valk series as the connoisseur's… |
| 1966 | The Quiller Memorandum | The Quiller Memorandum won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1966, published in Britain as The Berlin Memorandum, and it opened one of the genre's great… |
| 1965 | The Spy Who Came in from the Cold | The Spy Who Came in from the Cold won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1965, having already taken Britain's Gold Dagger, the first book to hold both, and… |
| 1964 | The Light of Day | The Light of Day won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1964, fresh American recognition for Eric Ambler, who had remade the thriller twice: the late… |
| 1963 | Death and the Joyful Woman | Death and the Joyful Woman won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1963, the American prize finding Ellis Peters a decade and a half before the books that… |
| 1962 | Gideon's Fire | Gideon's Fire won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1962, and the byline was a small joke on the prize: J. J. Marric was John Creasey, among the most… |
| 1961 | The Progress of a Crime | The Progress of a Crime won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1961, recognition for the British writer who was simultaneously the genre's leading… |
| 1960 | The Hours Before Dawn | The Hours Before Dawn won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1960, a British debut about an exhausted mother beating the year's professionals, and it has… |
| 1959 | The Eighth Circle | The Eighth Circle won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1959, adding the top prize to a career already decorated at the short length: Stanley Ellin was the… |
| 1958 | Room to Swing | Room to Swing won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1958, and its central creation is a genre landmark: Toussaint Moore stands as the first credible… |
| 1957 | A Dram of Poison | A Dram of Poison won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1957, recognition for the domestic suspense she helped pioneer, the school of quiet, respectable… |
| 1956 | Beast in View | Beast in View won the Edgar Award for Best Novel in 1956, and the prize record contains a detail that has aged into an argument. It beat Patricia… |
| 1955 | The Long Goodbye | The Long Goodbye won the Edgar for Best Novel in 1955, the only one of Chandler's novels so honoured, the prize arriving in time to crown the career… |
| 1954 | Beat Not the Bones | Beat Not the Bones won the first Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel ever presented, in 1954, putting an Australian woman's Papuan gothic at the… |