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Selected Crime Fiction Reviews
Selected Crime Fiction Reviews
Since the days of cheap pulp fiction published weekly or monthly in huge quantities rather a lot has changed when it comes to crime and not all for the better. There are exceptions of course.
Take Cornell Woolrich for example, so prolific he was published under many pseudonyms and his output in the 1940s established him as the leading writer of noir crime fiction. His 1942 story It Had to be Murder was the source of Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window and his novels The Bride Wore Black and The Night has a Thousand Eyes are still wonderful and very readable stories.
Like it or not in this day and age there are very few hard-boiled detectives living in L.A. searching for villains, getting knocked out by mobsters, given the third degree by cops under very bright lights and, of course, being irresistible to all the “dames” who seek him out in his seedy office.
Pick up a run-of-the-mill crime novel today and you are more likely to find a troubled detective with various addictions, a failed marriage and one or more estranged children. Almost inevitably he will be hunting a serial killer against all the odds while his colleagues heap scorn upon him.
My particular bugbear with these tick box novels is that there are always chapters entirely in italics devoted to the musings of the killer as he slowly unravels and reveals his tediously dull back story.
You could safely place a very substantial bet with Ladbrokes that his final victim will ALWAYS be the troubled sleuth which will lead to his inevitable capture and imprisonment and there is a very good chance he will be released on license just in time to appear in a future novel.
In my opinion the basic requirements for a good investigative novel is that it should be literate and contain a genuine puzzle for the reader to solve. That means the author has to supply all the clues the detective discovers along the way. If they cheat by introducing the murderer in the closing chapters or having the detective expound upon clues that only he knows about does a real disservice to the genre and the reader.
The handful of books I have reviewed here meet all of these rules and more. There's little point in discussing the books that I think are poorly done, although somebody once said that you are more highly regarded as a critic if you do not like anything. Well, to hell with that! These are books that I have really enjoyed and I hope you do to.