Prix Mystère de la critique


The Prix Mystère de la critique was established in 1972 by the magazine , published by the from 1948 to 1976, and continues to be awarded each year by its founder, Georges Rieben and his team. It has the characteristic of having survived the demise of the magazine.
The Prix Mystère de la critique is one of the oldest French award for a detective novel.
Since 2011, the award ceremony takes place at the.
The prize is divided in two categories: French novel and foreign novel.

Laureates of the best French novel

The prizewinners in the National category is reserved for the best French-language crime series published the previous year. The most successful in this category were the French Alain Demouzon, Pascal Dessaint, Thierry Jonquet, Dominique Manotti, Jean-Hugues Oppel, Fred Vargas and Hervé Le Corre, who won the prize twice. Vargas was at the same time the first female criminal writer to be awarded the prize.
The prizewinners in the International category, is reserved for the best foreign crime scene published in the previous year in French translation. The most successful in this category were Donald E. Westlake, Robin Cook, William Bayer and James Lee Burke, who could have won the award twice. Horst Bosetzky was the only German-speaking criminal writer, to succeed in the victory of a criminal writer. In 1988, he triumphed with his novel "Kein Reihenhaus" for Robin Hood, which had been published under the pseudonym -ky, under the title Robin des bois est mort, in the Bordeaux publishing house Le Mascaret the previous year.

2010s