Monday, February 08, 2010

The best crime novels of the decade -
Crime fiction experts Barry Forshaw and Laura Wilson pick the essential reading list


Select the key crime novels of the decade? A very difficult task, especially since there has been a particularly impressive stream of top-notch crime fiction in the past ten years, with — because of the new trend for crime in translation — more diversity of place and style than ever before.
We haven’t necessarily selected the most "important" novels — importance, we feel, is not, of itself, important. Good writing is, and good storytelling. We have included those books that we feel to be innovative, and individual as opposed to generic, and also books that are just bloody good examples of their type.

Elsewhere on Times Online: The 50 Greatest Crime Writers

2000 -
Nineteen Seventy-Seven by David Peace

David Peace's dark and pungent novel Nineteen Seventy-Seven is the second book in his much-acclaimed Red Riding Quartet. Like its predecessor, Nineteen Seventy-Four, the book trenchantly evokes the period and the corruption that was endemic in the police force during that time. Peace’s protagonists, conflicted copper Bob Fraser and cynical journo Jack Whitehead, are the reader's conduits through a society where justice is always ephemeral. Peace’s childhood in Ossett during the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper left him with memories that continued to plague him and provided the basis and inspiration for the Red Riding Quartet. The books forged a gritty new crime genre: Yorkshire Noir.

Honourable mentions: Ian Rankin, Set in Darkness; Donna Leon, Friends in High Places; Robert Wilson, A Small Death in Lisbon

2001
Mystic River by Dennis Lehane
Lehane’s reputation was built on such galvanic and ambitious novels as Darkness, Take my Hand and Gone, Baby, Gone, noted for their taut yet complex story lines and richly drawn protagonists. Mystic River consolidated his status as a major American talent. Childhood friends Sean, Jimmy and Dave have their destinies transformed when a car arrives in their street. One boy gets into the car and a terrible event follows that ruptures their friendship and changes their lives. Twenty-five years later, Sean has become a homicide detective, while Jimmy has turned to crime. When Jimmy’s daughter is found brutally murdered, Sean is assigned to the case and is obliged to travel back to a life he thought he had left behind. As a complex psychological thriller and a state-of-the-nation novel, this is exemplary stuff.

Honourable mentions: Jake Arnott, He Kills Coppers; Minette Walters, Acid Row; Harlan Coben, Tell No One

2002
Fingersmith by Sarah Waters
When Fingersmith was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Ellis Peters Historical Crime Fiction Dagger in 2002, it demonstrated that the quality of writing in the crime genre could be (at times) indistinguishable from more overtly literary fare. The Dickensian trappings (pickpockets, housebreakers, hypocritical Victorian mores) are energetically employed. Waters has recently shown that she’s no longer to be categorised solely as a lesbian writer with The Little Stranger, but Fingersmith is the ne plus ultra of her Sapphic writing, wrapped in highly persuasive (and labyrinthine) plotting and evocatively realised period settings.

Honourable mentions: Louise Welsh, The Cutting Room; Robert Littell, The Company; Michael Connelly, City of Bones

Read the picks for the full decade at The Times online.

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