In honor of the Bouchercon mystery conference, I thought I'd step back in time to 1997 and take a look at books honored with Anthony Awards at an earlier Boucheron, which have fallen off the radar.

Bouchercon XXVIII was held in 1997 in Monterey, California. The Guest Of Honor that year was Sara Paretsky, Toastmaster was Julie Smith, and the Lifetime Achievement Award was given to Donald Westlake. When the Anthony Awards were announced, there was a tie for Best First Novel between Death In Little Tokyo by Dale Furutani and Somebody Else's Child by Terris McMahan Grimes (the latter of which also won the Best Paperback Original Award). The Best Critical/Biographical award that year went to Detecting Women II by Willetta Heising. (Best novel, by the way, went to a book by that guy you might have heard a thing or two about, Michael Connelly, for The Poet.)

Death in Little Tokyo, Dale Furutani's first novel, not only won the Anthony in 1997, that same year it won a Macavity Award as well as being nominated for an Agatha. It introduced Ken Tanaka, the first Japanese-American amateur sleuth mystery series written by a Japanese-American. Tanaka isn't a real P.I. but poses as one for his weekend mystery club, printing up phony business cards, renting a storefront office, and buying a trench coat and fedora, until he gets some real business in the form of a woman who offers him $500 to help extricate her from a blackmail scheme. Death in Little Tokyo was one of only two novels in that series, although Furutani went on to write the Samurai Mystery Trilogy, the last of which was published in 2000.

Somebody Else's Child, by Terris McMahan Grimes, introduced Theresa Galloway, the plus-sized "intrepid soul sister," state employee and married mother of two. When amateur sleuth Galloway learns of a murder and kidnapping in her elderly mother's hometown, she's goaded by her mother into prowling the streets of Sacramento in search of the killer and the dead woman's missing grandchild. Grimes published two additional titles in the Galloway series, the second in 1997 and the last in 2000. Although she hasn't published any further installments, Grimes has remained active in literacy programs in her home state of California.

Willetta Heising's Detecting Women II was the latest in a series of mystery reader's guides by Willetta Heising, which also included the first Detecting Women, as well as the later books Detecting Men; Willetta's Guide to Private Eye Series; and Willetta's Guide to Police Detective Series. Detecting Women II is a database of mystery series written by women (up to that point, of course), with a ist of more than 500 authors, 675 series characters and 3,600 titles. There's a short biography and bibliography for each writer, a brief description of detectives in each series, publication dates and awards won. Another section of the book provides lists by mystery type (police procedural, amateurs, or PIs), character, setting, title, and author pseudonym. 

This year's Anthony Awards will be handed out virtually this year during the online conference which begins today and runs through tomorrow, October 17. You can check out the shortlists here, and look for the winners to be announced via social media on Saturday.