Pip: Screenplays, suspects, and the eternal question of who did it — and more importantly, who wrote it best.
Mara: This episode comes from crimemysteryfestival, and we're looking at the Summer 2026 season results — winners, honorable mentions, and what it means to place in a competitive field of crime and mystery scripts.
Pip: Let's get into the winners and the company they're keeping.
Summer 2026 Screenplay Winners and Honorable Mentions
Mara: The question here is what a strong season of crime and mystery screenwriting actually looks like — who rose to the top, and what distinguished a winner from the broader field of submissions.
Pip: The post sets the stakes plainly. The winners got something concrete: "a best scene of their screenplay performed by professional actors and made into a video."
Mara: That's not a certificate in a drawer — that's your work staged, performed, and captured on camera. For a screenwriter, that's a meaningful production credit and a real artifact to show.
Pip: Three scripts took that prize. The Last Hunt by Scott Joseph Cahill, THE HOLMES ENIGMA by Russell C. Babcock, and FLIGHT 17 by Richard Geiwitz. Three very different titles suggesting three very different corners of the genre.
Mara: Right — a hunt, a Holmes riff, and an aviation thriller. The genre is doing a lot of work across those three alone. And then the honorable mentions stretch the range even further.
Pip: Sixteen of them. Which is either a testament to the quality of the field or a very crowded shortlist, depending on your disposition.
Mara: The post describes honorable mentions as writers "in select company," which is worth taking seriously. Titles in that group include IN MONSTER'S HANDS, billed as a true-crime horror story by Darren W Burch, and WHO KILLED TRUELOVE? by Robert Adam Lifton — which might be the most crime-and-mystery title in the entire list.
Pip: You've also got SWEET DEADLY DREAMS, SKIN DEEP BLOOD RED, and PEACE, UNDONE in there — scripts that suggest the genre's emotional register runs from dread to something closer to elegy.
Mara: Others worth naming: Blackjack Inc. by Heath Erik Papkov, A Private Heaven by Dave Eagleston, Daybreak by Stephen Hiemstra, Webelos by Travis W Bruyer, The Perfect Match by Sammy Smedley, The Grave Robber by Ross Inman, Goldy by Gregory Funaro, WeHo Story by Tudor Munteanu, Monday's Hero by Larry Downes, High Time We Get Outta Here by Daniel Ahmadi and Danny Taff, and Time Before the Fall by Suzanne Birrell.
Pip: That's a full season's worth of crime on the page — and the next question is what comes next for the writers who placed.
Mara: A surplus of submissions, a tight winner's circle, and sixteen scripts that made the cut without taking the top prize — the genre is clearly not running out of stories to tell.
Pip: Next time, we'll see who else the festival has been watching.
Crime/Mystery Film & Writing Festival 