Gripping Crime Fiction

by Steven Powell

|

5 books

Crime fiction is one of the most popular genres in publishing. In fact, the market is so saturated that it is often difficult to find a novel that sticks out in an entertaining but, let’s face it, formulaic field. My idea of the perfect crime novel is one where the status quo has been disturbed by a violent crime, shaking people out of the complacency of their comfortable lives. Only then do I feel that the characters are in danger and something important is at stake. Good character development, unexpected but plausible twists, and a mounting sense of tension should follow from this premise. Here are some favourites of mine which, I feel, achieve this high standard.

Read more... Read less...

The Black Dahlia

James Ellroy, 2008

This is a personal pick for me, as I have a lifelong obsession with the work of James Ellroy and wrote the first, and so far, only biography of him. The Black Dahlia was his seventh and breakout novel. Taking the real-life unsolved murder of Elizabeth Short (the Black Dahlia of the title) in Los Angeles in 1947, Ellroy provides a dark richly-layered portrait of post-war LA, his hometown. Although he writes almost exclusively about the past, Ellroy makes it come alive with an immediacy and an ever-present sense of danger. The Dahlia case was a personal one for Ellroy as his own mother was murdered in 1958 and the killer was never found. Fiction provides the solutions that remain elusive in real life.

The Fan Club

Irving Wallace, 1974

Four seemingly random guys meet in Los Angeles and cook up a scheme to seduce the most famous and beautiful movie star in the world. If they can kidnap Sharon Fields (the woman of their dreams) and take her to a secluded cabin, then surely, over the course of a fortnight, she would fall in love with them, right? Needless to say, it all goes horribly wrong. The Fan Club was a major bestseller in its day, but fifty years after publication, its sexual politics are problematic. Even though we are never meant to sympathise with these four guys, we spend a lot of time in their heads. That said, the second half, where Sharon begins to turn the tables on her abductors, is particularly satisfying.

Compulsion

Meyer Levin, 2015

Do you enjoy binge-watching true crime documentaries on Netflix and Amazon? Meyer Levin understood that urge seventy years ago when he wrote an epic crime novel recreating every detail of the Leopold & Loeb kidnapping and murder of the fourteen-year-old Bobby Franks. Levin’s knowledge of the case, dubbed ‘the crime of the century’, is astonishing, and he never fails to render it into compelling fiction. Leopold & Loeb are renamed Strauss & Steiner in the novel. Compulsion pre-dates Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood as the first ‘nonfiction novel’, and is still gripping today as the public’s appetite for true crime narratives seems to grow every year.

Innocent Blood

P.D. James, 2012

Upon turning eighteen, Phillipa Palfrey, who has long known she was adopted, decides to use her legal right to examine her biological roots. She has entertained fantasies that she was a product of the establishment, from an adulterous liaison between an aristocrat and a parlour maid. The truth she uncovers is far more disturbing. PD James was one of the most thoughtful and elegant writers of crime and detective fiction. With Innocent Blood, she stepped away from her highly successful Adam Dalgliesh series of novels to write a beautifully constructed psychological thriller. It is not a detective novel but an examination of how the past haunts the present and, as Phillipa discovers, still threatens us.

Tokyo

Mo Hayder, 2005

Mo Hayder had one of the most fascinating and enigmatic backgrounds of any crime writer. She was born Clare Damaris Bastin and worked under a variety of names as an actress and model. Tokyo was inspired by the time she spent living in Japan working as a nightclub hostess. A young woman who is obsessed with the Japanese invasion of Nanjing in 1937 (and the subsequent ‘Rape of Nanjing’) travels to Japan to meet a professor she believes has rare footage of the massacre. The professor agrees to show her the footage on the condition that she procure a mysterious ingredient of Chinese medicine from the Yakuza. Hayder was renowned for her gory visceral style, alternating seamlessly between gritty realism and hints of mysticism.