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Colette Bancroft wins Mystery Writers of America award

Bill DeYoung

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Colette Bancroft

Although she hadn’t written any fiction since her long-ago college days, Colette Bancroft took the plunge in 2020 and penned a dark narrative called “The Bite,” based very, very loosely on her childhood experiences in Hillsborough County.

On Monday “The Bite” received the Mystery Writers of America’s Robert L. Fish Award for the best short story by a previously unpublished American author.

Bancroft, the Tampa Bay Times’ book editor, included the story in Tampa Bay Noir, for which she served as editor. The anthology was published last August by Akashic Books, part of a national series of “noir” fiction books based in specific geographic locations.

The award, Bancroft said, “is also an indication of the quality of the whole book. Which as the editor of the book I am very, very proud of. And I’m really glad that this will bring attention to the whole book.”

Among the better-known contributors to Tampa Bay Noir were Michael Connelly, Lisa Unger, Sarah Gerard, Tim Dorsey and Lori Roy.

Bancroft, 68, grew up in Rattlesnake, a now-vanished area of South Tampa. The protagonist of “The Bite” is a 12-year-old girl, in the 1960s, who experiences some disturbing things in Rattlesnake.

It’s not me, Bancroft insists.

“Like most fiction, little bits of it are things that happened to me, or that I observed in my own life,” she explained. “And a lot of it is made up to sort of link those things together. I think it came together for me when I started entertaining the idea of writing a noir story for this book specifically, because it coalesced as a story that is dark. And doesn’t have a happy resolution.”

Many reviews of Tampa Bay Noir mentioned Bancroft in the same breath as some of the more established writers. “Some people didn’t like some of the other stories, many people did like a lot of them, but when mine is mentioned in reviews it usually gets a good response,” Bancroft said. “And I was very gratified by that.”

A Times staff writer since 1997, Bancroft is also the steward of the annual Festival of Reading, which by necessity became a virtual-only event in 2020.

“It was a learning experience, let’s say that,” she laughed. “It was different from the way that we have usually done it. And I certainly missed the ‘in real life’ event; I think most people did too. However, I was very happy at the response that we got, especially from the events that we did with very top authors.

“We don’t know yet what shape it’s going to take this year, it’s too soon to know. However we end up doing it, we learned a lot from doing it this way this year. And totally flying by the seat of our pants.”

Related: Colette Bancroft discusses Tampa Bay Noir on The Catalyst Sessions

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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