Tag: Crime

  • Gone Girl: Gillian Flynn

    This disquieting psychological crime novel is one of the most talked about books of the past year, partly for the simple reason that people love discussing other couples’ marriages. In this case, it’s the Dunnes: Amy’s a trust fund girl from the Upper East Side who inspired her psychologist parents’ children’s books, Nick’s a refugee…

  • Foreign Bodies

    To echo this week’s triumphant Booker speech by Hilary Mantel, you wait years for a Riverside blog on foreign crime fiction and then two turn up at once. But Radio 4’s scrutiny of European literary detectives in the weeks ahead cannot go unmentioned, and the station’s dramatisation of Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo’s series featuring…

  • Andrea Camilleri: Inspector Montalbano

    THE Scandinavian invasion has defined crime fiction in recent years as we embraced chilly, bleak and ingeniously gruesome novels from Henning Mankell, Jo Nesbo and Hakan Nesser. Perhaps readers are now ready for a warmer crime climate. Just as Mankell’s Wallander novels benefited from TV adaptations, 87-year-old Andrea Camilleri’s enjoying a sales boost for his…

  • The Talented Mr Ripley: Patricia Highsmith

    A brilliant psychological thriller and one of the best crime novels of the 20th Century. Highsmith is a masterful storyteller and has written an insanely readable book. A supremely stylish page turner with one of the most wonderfully amoral protagonists of all time. 

  • Jar City: Arnaldur Indridason

    I can’t see this series of books being endorsed by the Icelandic Tourist Board any time soon but don’t let that stop you. In this first instalment of the ‘Reykjavik Murder Mysteries’ we are introduced to troubled detective Erlendur. He’s been sent to investigate the murder of an old man in his Reykjavik flat. The only…

  • Death in a cold climate

    Dark and seedy Scandinavian crime thrills thrillers are by no means a new genre but there’s no denying they have enjoyed something of a resurgence on the bestseller lists since Steig Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy.  Of course there’s nothing new coming from that direction so instead, if the inkling for more remains, it might be worth…

  • How The Dead Live: Derek Raymond

    Derek Raymond’s quartet of factory novels feature some of the bleakest descriptions of low life London put down on the page. Raymond manages to conjure in his view of 1980’s Britain a similar sense of morbid detail and helplessness that the painter Walter Sickert captured in his portraits of London’s waifs and strays a hundred…

  • Charles Willeford: Cockfighter

    Until the mid-eighties when he hit pay dirt with his Hoke Mosely quartet Charles Willeford’s previous books seemed destined to remain buried in paperback obscurity. His mid-eighties commercial success, thirty years after his first novel, ‘The High Priest of California’, was published changed this and suddenly his previous paperbacks were being sought after by collectors.…