When a Murderer Wins a “Best Murder Mystery” Writing Prize

I missed this Sarah Weinman story in T Magazine over the weekend, and it’s fascinating. Every year, the Private Eye Writers of America co-sponsor a lucrative contest with St. Martin’s Press imprint Minotaur Books, in which the winner gets a $10,000 advance and a guaranteed publishing contract; in 2011, the winner was Alaric Hunt, currently serving a life sentence in prison for the murder of a 23-year-old woman killed in a fire that he set to distract from a robbery.

Alaric Hunt turned 44 in September. He last saw the outside world at 19. […] He stumbled across a 2007 edition of Writer’s Market, listing Minotaur’s contest for the best unpublished private-detective novel. There was no entry fee, and the prize money was enticing. He could pay off debts. He could buy his older brother a television set. The contest could mean a different way forward for him.

He took five months to write the first draft of his book, titled “Cuts Through Bone,” in longhand (and another four months for a rewrite), carving out bits of writing time between the morning, noon and night counts. He sketched out a story set in New York City, a place he had never visited. […] He assembled the other elements of his novel from piecemeal glances of the outside world. He took cues for his version of New York, for example, from “Law and Order” episodes; a photocopy of a 1916 map of the boroughs; Berenice Abbott’s “Changing New York”; and novels he read set in the city.

His editor corresponded with him almost entirely through prison mail. [T]