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Crime

Crime fiction began in 1841 with Edgar Allan Poe’s story The Murders in the Rue Morgue, and its popularity has never waned. Stories concentrate either on events leading up to the crime or on detection. Some crime-centred books are darkly psychological, exploring the mind of the criminal compelled towards the crime. Others are ‘caper’ novels, showing the detailed planning and execution of the crime and concentrating on the relationships of everyone involved. Many detection-centred books are procedural, following the investigation of a crime step by meticulous step. Others centre on the character of the detective (an eccentric genius; a dogged cop with a complicated private life; a private eye who is the guardian of morality and integrity in a corrupt world). In 99 per cent of all crime fiction, from Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) to the latest Sue Grafton or Ian Rankin, the crime is murder. In the first heyday of crime fiction (the 1930s) people favoured ‘snobbery with violence’ (as in the books of Dorothy L. Sayers) and ‘locked room’ mysteries (such as those of John Dickson Carr). Nowadays, in the second heyday, we prefer psychological thrillers (such as those of Barbara Vine), procedurals (often set in the past, or abroad) and private eye stories.

Lawrence Block, The Burglar Who Thought He Was Bogart (1995). Block has written a cherishable series of books about the amiable, witty burglarcum-bookseller Bernie Rhodenbarr and this title, in which Bernie adopts the persona of Bogart, is one of the best.

John Dickson Carr, The Blind Barber (1933). Classic tale of beautiful women, international playboys, priceless jewels, stolen films, diplomatic incidents and murder, set on a transatlantic liner. Wonderful sense of period; one of the most rollicking of all ‘locked room’ mysteries.

Harlan Coben, Tell No One (2001). A doctor whose wife was murdered eight years earlier receives what seems to be an e-mail from her and is plunged into a nightmarish world of mystery and betrayal in Coben’s tense and suspenseful novel.

Colin Dexter, The Jewel That Was Ours (1991). Opera-loving loner Morse and his assistant Lewis investigate murder among a group of Americans doing the Oxford Heritage Tour.

Michael Dibdin, Dead Lagoon (1994). Dibdin’s policeman Aurelio Zen returns to his native Venice and finds himself anything but at home as he struggles to solve the disappearance of a wealthy American and to disentangle webs of deceit both personal and political.

James Ellroy, The Black Dahlia (1987). The first in Ellroy’s powerful LA Quartet, this fictionalized account of a famous sex murder from the 1940s reveals Ellroy’s mastery of period, dialogue and characterization and his dark, obsessive imagination.

Reginald Hill, Dialogues of the Dead (2001). Hill skilfully weaves together the investigations of his two policemen, Dalziel and Pascoe, and the inner world of a serial killer who is a word-obsessed maniac intent on playing games with them.

William Hjortsberg, Falling Angel (1979). Cult classic, memorably filmed in 1987 as Angel Heart by Alan Parker, in which seedy, hard-boiled hero Harry Angel homes in on some terrible truths. Trespassing rewardingly on other fiction genres (horror, fantasy), this is a crime novel like no other.

Joe Lansdale, The Bottoms (2000). Deftly combining a murder mystery with an elegiac coming-of-age story, Lansdale’s book is set in east Texas in the mid-1930s. Its narrator, Harry Crane, on the verge of his teenage years, has his life changed forever when he discovers a mutilated body in the river bottoms near his home.

Donna Leon, Death in a Strange Country (1993). Commissario Brunetti, the protagonist in all of Leon’s Venetian tales, finds his inquiries into the death of an American soldier on the mainland are blocked by high command.

Peter Lovesey, A Case of Spirits (1975). Lovesey specializes in period detective stories. In this, nineteenth-century Sergeant Cribb investigates murder and spiritualism among the snobbish middle classes of suburban London.

Gladys Mitchell, Laurels Are Poison (1942). Classic eccentric-detective tale, in which Mrs Lestrange Bradley, witch-like psychologist and sleuth, investigates the murder of the warden of an all-women teachers’ training college.

George Pelecanos, Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go (1998). Super-boozer and P.I. Nick Stefanos awakes from a bender in a public park to find a body being dumped in the river nearby. In a novel filled with pop-culture references and 1980s hedonism, he pursues the killers.

Ellis Peters, One Corpse Too Many (1979). Ellis Peters wrote a series about worldly-wise monk and herbalist Brother Cadfael in which cosy crime met the Middle Ages. TV has now given her books an even wider readership than before. This one, in which monks burying the dead from a battle find one more body than they bargained for, shows Cadfael at his most likeable.

Ian Rankin, Black and Blue (1997). Rankin provides a wonderfully wide-ranging panorama of contemporary Scotland as his series character, Rebus, investigates a series of killings which has echoes of a famous case from the past.

Rex Stout, Too Many Cooks (1938). Classic story in which fat, woman-hating, orchid-growing genius Nero Wolfe and his legman Archie Goodwin investigate murder at a conference for master chefs at a West Virginia luxury hotel.

Also recommended:   James Lee Burke, Cadillac Jukebox    Patricia Cornwell, Post-Mortem    Edmund Crispin, The Moving Toyshop    Loren Estleman, The Hours of the Virgin    Francis Iles, Malice Aforethought    John D. MacDonald, The Deep Blue Goodbye    Walter Mosley, Devil in a Blue Dress    Peter Robinson, Gallows View    James Sallis, The Long-Legged Fly    Julian Symons, A Three Pipe Problem    Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time    Scott Turow, Presumed Innocent    Barbara Vine, A Fatal Inversion    Charles Willeford, Miami Blues    Robert Wilson, A Small Crime in Lisbon    Margaret Yorke, No Medals for the Major    See also:    Margery Allingham    Raymond Chandler    Agatha Christie    Classic Detection    Sue Grafton    Great (Classic) Detectives    Dashiel Hammett    Jack Higgins    Patricia Highsmith    Marsh    Police Procedural    Private Eyes    Ruth Rendell    Georges Simenon