So good it's a crime

FOR crime fans, Books to Die For (Hodder & Stoughton, 734pp, $49.44) is one of the most anticipated publications of the year.

FOR crime fans, Books to Die For (Hodder & Stoughton, 734pp, $49.44) is one of the most anticipated publications of the year.

The "best" living crime writers were asked what their favourite mystery was, and the beguiling and entertaining result is an original canon that should provoke arguments and some anguish in bars for years. What was sought was passionate advocacy, one novel each to be placed in the list, the single book the chosen writer would press on you over a late-night drink when the talk turns to favourite novels, as it usually does when crime fans meet and obsess over the red herrings, the certain suspects and those stings in the tail.

Editors John Connolly and Declan Burke, distinguished practitioners themselves, accommodate 120 contributors in this vast collection. Some have written essays and reviews but there are also revealing personal memoirs from crime authors built on their recollections of first reading certain novels.

Michael Connelly, of the Bosch cop mysteries, writes that reading Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye in 1973 changed the direction of his life and brought him to the crime novelist's table. Karin Slaughter reclaims Metta Fuller Victor's The Dead Letter from 1867. She was the first American to publish a full-length detective novel in the US, inevitably written under a pseudonym, and Slaughter laments that the person who created an entire genre has been erased from consciousness. Strong stuff indeed, worth a double shot at the writer's late-night bar.

The range of contributors is impressive, including Lee Child, Ian Rankin, Val McDermid, Kathy Reichs and Elmore Leonard. (Leonard says George V. Higgins's The Friends of Eddie Coyle taught him to relax and not be so rigid about trying to make the prose sound like writing. A lesson well learned, indeed.)

Pleasingly, local authors Kathryn Fox, Michael Robotham, Shane Maloney and Katherine Howell make the list of contributors. And Peter Temple's The Broken Shore is the chosen book of British procedural great John Harvey, famous for his series of jazz-influenced Nottingham-based Charlie Resnick novels. "Put simply, Temple is a master," he says.

What's intriguing is the way patterns emerge as the essays, dealing with books chronologically from Edgar Allan Poe's 1841-44 Dupin stories to Mark Gimenez's The Perk in 2008, accumulate in the reading, a mosaic falling into place. The collection reveals in a quite unforced way how the mystery novel evolved from one form to another through the decades, and came to deal with a particular subject during a specific period in response to wider cultural and political shifts.

To illustrate, the editors take the year 1947, which produces Dorothy B. Hughes's In a Lonely Place, which sowed the seeds of the serial killer novel, and Mickey Spillane's I, the Jury. Both examine male rage and emerge in the aftermath of World War II, when men returned from battle to find a changed world. It's also the year of the still unsolved Black Dahlia killing, such an influence not only on James Ellroy but also on John Gregory Dunne.

Lee Child writes about Kenneth Orvis's The Damned and the Destroyed, set in Montreal at the turn of the 1960s, a private eye novel in which the hero is Maxwell Dent. "Like most of his generation, Dent is ex-services, and pretty solid ... a bit of a stiff, basically," Child writes. He says the plot, involving Dent's rescue of the heroin addict daughter of some rich guy - "very Raymond Chandler" - is quickly established, the opening a very short expository info-dump, via dialogue. "And then we're off to the races." He guesses that while the mechanics of the narcotics trade are a little dated, not much else is: "This is where thrillers were in about 1960, and not much has changed."

And Child is back at the races himself with A Wanted Man (Bantam, 427pp, $32.95), picking up his hero Jack Reacher in Nebraska just after the conclusion of Worth Dying For, his nose broken and still trying to hitch a ride east to Virginia. Reacher, Child's epic hero, is the ex-MP drifter with the seldom-talked-about past, who has an almost psychotic obsession with being his own man, of no fixed address, and who carries nothing but, almost literally, the shirt on his back. This chivalrous superman journeys the US at whim, dispensing his own brand of justice, transcending the tawdry and corrupt routines of the legal system.

Too intimidating to be anyone's first choice of companion, the silver duct tape over his nose making him look even more grotesque, Reacher, in this new novel is picked up by three apparent business colleagues, one a woman, all wearing black pants and blue denim shirts. Within minutes it's clear to Reacher they are lying about everything ... and then they run into a police roadblock.

The Reacher books are spare and tight but cunningly evoke many other writers such as John Buchan (the sense of place), Zane Grey (the loner western hero), and Leslie Charteris (heroic altruism). There's even a touch of Spillane with the grisly violence and rushing pace.

"A good thriller draws you in and makes you feel as if you're reading faster than the action is occurring on the page," Child says about his taut and brutal tales. Not an easy thing to do, but something he accomplishes with surprising dispatch.

John Gordon Sinclair didn't make the Books to Die For list as a noted writer of contemporary crime fiction but he might turn up in the next collection. He's a famous British actor, best known for the 1981 coming-of-age movie Gregory's Girl and, more recently, for award-winning stage performances. And his debut thriller, Seventy Times Seven (Faber and Faber, 374pp, $29.99), is tautly written and wonderfully plotted.

Set in 1992, it moves between Northern Ireland during the Troubles and Tuscaloosa in Alabama. Danny McGuire wages war to avenge his brother's death six years earlier, a hit man for hire, any member of the security forces a legitimate target. The title is a quote from the Bible that asks what limits there are on forgiveness and in this novel, at least initially, there's little in evidence. Danny is contracted to eliminate the "Thevshi" - the Ghost - the most elusive informant to penetrate the Republican movement in Northern Ireland. But there's a problem: the Thevshi, aka Finn O'Hanlon, claims to know who's responsible for his brother's death.

Sinclair writes vividly, even if his descriptions of the sectarian violence are brutal and graphic (he admits to the influence of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian) but he also nails the Northern Irish dark humour.

British writer Jon Stock doesn't make Connolly and Burke's list either but he has emerged in the past few years as a stunning espionage novelist, his novels living up to their promo line "John le Carre meets Jason Bourne". Dirty Little Secret (Blue Door, 448pp, $29.99) is the third in the "Legoland" trilogy, following the escapades of Daniel Marchant, a 30-year-old renegade MI6 field officer who is at war with the CIA. He is forced undercover to prove his innocence, and that of his late father, a former head of MI6, discredited by the Americans.

In this final instalment Marchant is running Salim Dhar, the world's most wanted terrorist who, having agreed to work for MI6, is promising to protect Britain from future terrorist atrocities. But in return Marchant must help him with a final strike against the US. Should Britain sign up to this Faustian pact or hunt them both down? Intelligence chiefs are divided - and one of them may just be a double agent himself, working for Moscow.

Stock, a former investigative journalist, has an enthusiasm for the clandestine and once used a microphone disguised as a pen to record a Mr Big, who was smuggling birds of prey from Britain to the Gulf. As he says, journalism has always shared a bed with espionage: in both professions you try to persuade people to tell you things they would rather keep secret. And the British are experts, still setting the tone for the fictitious portrayal of spies.