Crime fiction

[Sexual Chocolate]

Crime fiction

I read No Country for Old Men without seeing the film and it didn't do much for me. Bit too sparse for my tastes and I'm not really into stuff with a sort of Western backdrop. Read it on recommendation, and McCarthy's revered round my way.

In terms of detective stuff I've only really read Chandler. The Long Goodbye and a couple of other Marlowe vehicles. Like his style more than the actual stories.

[Felicity, I guess so]

Crime fiction

currently half way through 'Collusion". Ive started so Ill finish but wont be boosing Mr Nevilles bank balance again

Well I don't boost anyone's bank balance, really, can't remember the last time I bought a new book.

I much prefer 'Collusion' to 'the Twelve', and I think the post-Troubles Belfast setting provides lots of meat for obsessive, Ellroy-style protagonists.

[Felicity, I guess so]

Crime fiction

Jefferson Parker (formerly had a 'T' in front of his name):

Have always enjoyed his books without being convinced they were great or important, but I've just finished California Girl and I think it's a minor classic.

Like Ellroy it has 'real' people as characters (Manson, Nixon, Timothy Leary...)

Like Ellroy it has obsessive characters crusading for truth or love or both (a journalist, a detective, an evangelical minister...all from the same family)

It has brutal murder and sexual violence, not really Ellroy-style, but it also has a real sense of time and place: Southern California 1960-2007, but mainly in '68.

Really sad to finish it- stirring stuff.

[Sundeporino]

Crime fiction

Elmore Leonard RIP.

Strolling past the Sherlock Holmes museum when Mrs Rino texted me the bad news.

My favourite novelist and by far the greatest crime writer to set foot on the planet. The posh papers will be full of him next weekend. Tarantino, Travolta, De Niro, Amis, King etc etc will be eulogising their arses off.

His beauty and curse was always that once you'd read his best stuff then 90% of ANY genres writing was virtually unreadable. Ive been pondering throwing away the ridiculously high "to be read" pile because I know rereading EL will be more pleasureable. The charity shop wont know whats hit them on saturday morning.

Try Bandits, Swag or Pagan Babies if youve never had the pleasure.

[JtS]

Crime fiction

Thw Ace Atkins, Robert B. Parker Spenser books are really very good, very RBPlike. I've read a couple of AA's other books and they're pretty good in the Lee Child sort of vein.

I recommend Th Ranger and The Lost Ones

[Sundeporino]

Crime fiction

Read Josephine Teys debut "The Man In The Queue" last week. Would the 1920s Scotland Yard not photograph a corpse they struggled to identify in real life? That was nagging away at me all the way through and spoilt the whole thing eventually. Poor ending as well.
Apparently its not her best but lifes too short to find out.

Also a sci fi/cop novel "The Revisionists" which involves a "terminator' style cop coming back in time to ensure that rogue elements from the future dont alter history thus preventing earths "perfect future society". Its ok but should make a decent film if handled correctly.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Crime fiction

Amazon has published it's list of 100 mysteries and thrillers to read before you die.

I reckon I've got about half of them covered, but there are quite a few that I've never got around to. So, like a good Pavlovian puppy, I immediately downloaded a few of them: Alan Furst's Night Soldiers because of the period, and possible echoes of Ambler. Donna Tartt's The Secret Society, as I recall the fuss when it was published, and her latest book has just won a Pullizer. And A Rage in Harlem by Chester Himes, because it's been recommended forever and I'd never got around it.

It's the one I'm reading right now, and have to say it's not what I expected, but very much better. It's probably enough to know it's written by a misanthropic Afro-American living in France, (who didn't know Harlem at all) and commissioned by surrealist publisher Marcel Duhamel. Hard-boiled is accurate, but really doesn't cover it. Funny, cynical, but never bleak, and always slightly off kilter. It feels as if it was written in a single outpouring of breathe, yet remains utterly coherent. It can probably be read in afternoon, but it's more fun to savour, like a very good rye.

[boris]

Crime fiction

Chester Himes is great - I recommend Blind Man with a Pistol as well, if you can find it.

I'm currently reading Mazaryk Station by David Downing, the last in his series of WWII books all named after various stations in Berlin. Not a crime thriller as such although with echoes of Alan Furst in terms of period and excellent scene-setting descriptions. Also recommended, and again set in Berlin during WWII, are the Bernie Gunther books by Philip Kerr (which include the Berlin Noir trilogy).

[Amor de Cosmos]

Crime fiction

Thanks. If you haven't read them, and WW2 mysteries are your thing, I recommend the St Cyr/Kohler novels by J. Robert Janes. They're set in occupied France and involve the enforced professional collaboration of a German Gestapo officer and member of the Sûreté. I haven't read the entire series (up to about fourteen I think) but the early stories are excellent.

[boris]

Crime fiction

I'll look out for them. Meanwhile I random browse on Amazon has turned up Allan Massie, who has written a series of detective novels set in WWII Bordeaux and which have received good reviews, so yet more to add to the list!

[Felicity, I guess so]

Crime fiction

I've read all the Downings except that one, boris. I prefer them to the Bernie Gunthers, which I do like, but the homage to hard-boiled style is not entirely to my taste in the latter.

Since we're on OTF, one nice feature of the Downing novels is the central, Anglo-American, character tries to bond with his (increasingly Hitler-Jugend) son by taking him to Hertha games and in a later novel there's a great scene of someone being recruited to spy for the Soviets at the Chelsea-Dynamo Moscow match.

[Felicity, I guess so]

Crime fiction

But I can't leave the crime thread without expressing my all round love for Denise Mina. Just read 'The End of the Wasp Season'.

Some lovely moments in a grim and bloody murder story.

[JtS]

Crime fiction

I'm on a bit of Crime/Sci-Fi at the moment, I'd say it was 50/50. Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey.


80% through and it's pretty good.

[JtS]

Crime fiction

And anyone who enjoyed Michael Connelly's Bosch books would almost certainly enjoy the Amazon Prime series of Bosch. 1st series is Echo Park I think, and the 2nd is Trunk Music

I liked Connelly's Lincoln Lawyer variants too.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Crime fiction

Connelly's good, but I took some time getting into the zone. His style seemed dull, prosaic even, then I realised it's intentional. He's all about describing process, which — as in most jobs — for the police is mostly desk-work and chasing futile leads. Once I got that, the stories immediately came to life.

My snack reading at the moment is David Liss's Benjamin Weaver series: A Conspiracy of Paper, A Spectacle of Corruption, and The Devil's Company. They're set in London of the 1820s. Weaver is an ex-pugilist turned thief-taker, he's also Jewish. Liss is an ex-academic, and the strength of these books lies in historical detail especially economic and social issues. The life of Jews in the city, particularly "Portuguese" Jews — ie: those from Southern Europe — is well portrayed. Also well explained in the first book is the South Sea Bubble, which I remember from high school but never quite got. And — in the second — the way elections were run back then. Recommended if you have any interest at all in historical fiction.

[Reed John]

Crime fiction

JtS wrote: I'm on a bit of Crime/Sci-Fi at the moment, I'd say it was 50/50. Leviathan Wakes by James S. A. Corey.


80% through and it's pretty good.

Me too!

I liked the TV show, but found it hard to follow, so I decided to read it.

[ursus arctos]

Crime fiction

I don't really "do" crime fiction, but Liss sounds like someone I would enjoy.

I note that he also wrote the book for the version of the Black Panther comic before Ta-Nehisi Coates was hired for the re-boot.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Crime fiction

Yes. His comic book writing has abbreviated the frequency of his novels somewhat.

[Sundeporino]

Crime fiction

Just finished "The Other Side Of Silence" by Philip Kerr.
Its now 1956 and Bernie Gunthers working in a French Riviera hotel and W. Somerset Maugham needs his help regarding a blackmail matter....
Bernies not Bernie anymore and neither is he crakin wise as much.

7/10

[JtS]

Crime fiction

The TV show hasn't been aired in the Uk yet, I'm a third of the way into Caliban's War, the second of the series.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Flowers over the Inferno by Ilaria Tuti is the most interesting and gripping first novel I've read in some time. Though it has genre-conventional leading characters: the aging superintendent, who is cranky as all get out and doesn't suffer fools gladly, and the ambitious subordinate who quickly becomes her foil/fool, these aren't the reasons for the story's quality. (Though Teresa, a single woman in her fifties suffering what she suspects are the early signs of dementia, is well conceived and and written.) No, what sets Tuti's writing apart is that the detective/mystery novel is merely a framework for writing about location, and dangers of community.

Tuti was born and lives in the Italian alps which, provide Flowers over the Inferno's location, and her descriptions of the region verge on pastoral writing at it's finest. Her love and protectiveness of it is evident throughout. Yet she's also aware of the darkness and dangers its isolation can bring. There's a sense here that grandeur and, now vanishing, remoteness have harboured a poisonous collective protectiveness that's a threat to individuality. Tuti's writing suggests and evokes these characteristics rather than spelling them out however. She's an extremely subtle writer working in a genre that rarely promotes such a thing. If I had to pigeon-hole her style the closest I'd come is neo-gothic. But not not totally black gothic, more dark-green, and dripping wet. Two more books in the series are promised. Excellent!

[DPDPDPDP]

Crime fiction

Just finished Safe House by Chris Ewan, and thoroughly enjoyed it. It's a while since I thought a book was genuinely exciting (a thriller, in fact). I usually find it odd when a story switches between first person (the protagonist) and third person (everyone else) but he carries it off.

Currently only 20p on Kindle, as well.

I have to admit I'd never heard of the author, stumbled across this one during a search for something else, and thought I'd give it a go based on the reviews. I may now buy another of his - which, I suppose, is why this 20p thing is done.

Chris Ewan lived on the Isle of Man for while and set a couple of his books there. I think Safe House was one. Very good too.

[DPDPDPDP]

Being Scottish, I’ve read and loved all the Rebus books, Quintin Jardine’s Skinner books and the Stuart MacBride ones.

Also love Michael Connolly’s Bosch series.

earlier a poster was lamenting a Nicci French book. Totally agree. Started to read one and gave up. Awful.

[Amor de Cosmos]

I almost put Rocket to the Morgue in the Noir section, but it's really not. Sure, it's written in the right period (1941), it's setting is the pulp fiction industry and there's a vague tone of Hammett's The Thin Man but that's it really. Anthony Boucher was a sci-fi writer and here he plays with the crime genre in order to have fun at his colleagues,' and his own, expense. Apparently several of the characters are based on writers of the era, including Robert Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard (uh huh) and John W. Campbell. On the plus side it does give an inside picture of the pulp industry, albeit a kind of cartoonish one, and the story certainly gallops along nicely. Crime-wise it's basically a "locked room" story, which would normally be enough to turn me off but the resolution is so ludicrous you can't help but laugh. I learned a few things, such as fanzines (under that name) have been around since the earliest days of pulp, and the dismal rates of pay were real and no joke. Altogether an enjoyable fast read, provided you don't take it at all seriously.

[Sunderporinostesta]

Just finished the first of William Mcilvanneys Glasgow set Laidlaw series. Titled errrh Laidlaw. Half way through I realised I’d read it about 30yrs ago. He’s the usual maverick cop with all that entails. In the quotes on the back Ian Rankin says “It’s doubtful I would be a crime writer without McIlvanney”. He’s spot on there. DNA tests on both Laidlaw and Rebus may well reveal a shock in their family trees. Mcilvanneys the better writer in my opinion.
William is Hughs brother by the way.