2011 Crime Review of the Year
In the last twelve months, I’ve smelled spilled blood in the High Arctic, witnessed the sectarian thaw in Northern Ireland, ridden with outdoorsmen through rural Wyoming, and read Mickey Spillane’s books from beyond the grave. Though my hernia-addled postman may disagree, it’s been quite a year. At time of writing, I’ve read just shy of 100 crime books, as such, feel moderately qualified to take a view on the greatest crime fiction hits of 2011. At risk of provoking vehement disagreements in our comments section, my personal top ten appear here strictly in the order I read them…
Our journey begins in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, with The Drop by Ferryhill’s Howard Linskey. Gangland has always provided a rich thematic seam for British authors to mine, but few have done so with more panache than Linskey showed in this dazzling debut. The Drop is a sordid and violent tale, told with great vigour by the most promising debutant I’ve read this year.
Leaving Northumberland and heading to Denmark, the finest Scandi offering of another year’s plethora was Jussi Adler-Olsen’s sublime Mercy. Its parts are the stuff of well-worn cliché; a downtrodden detective working cold cases, a broken marriage and a pervasive Nordic miserablism. But, through exceptional prose and the introduction of one of the most engaging and complex sidekick characters, Mercy towers above the ordinary. Morck and assistant Assad will return in English in mid 2012; the wait has been killing me since January this year.
The award for most poignant book of the year must go to Steve Hamilton’s The Lock Artist, deserved winner of the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger. With a mute protagonist who never says a single word, Hamilton tells a tale of love, exploitation and alienation, managing to weave such noble and evocative themes around a full-blooded thriller.
Staying with our cousins in the USA, Ryan David Jahn’s The Dispatcher offered an all-too plausible account of a protracted abduction. Jahn’s writing has strong overtones of Stephen King, capturing the crushing hopelessness and insularity of small towns in the American south, rounding off with a bullet-riddled finale.
From dusty American settlements to Gothic English country piles, in July my mind was blown by the effortless excellence of Erin Kelly’s The Sick Rose. A brooding and brilliant character study in two parts (and two eras), it introduced us to Paul and Louisa, two people haunted by their own dark pasts. Kelly’s eye for emotion is staggering; the scenes where she describes the youth of an awkward adolescent are more vivid than my memories of actually being one.
The opening segment of Tom Rob Smith’s Demidov trilogy struck a blow for crime fiction by finding itself long listed for the Booker Prize. As the trilogy drew to a close in Agent 6, Smith examined the death throes of Communism through the prism of a very private tragedy. Smith tells a ripping revenge yarn spanning three decades and half the world, and does so while taking a sledgehammer to the established orthodoxy surrounding the politics of the Cold War.
I suspected at the time that Simon Spurrier’s A Serpent Uncoiled would be the most original book of the year, and am unsurprised by the lack of serious competition for the title. Twisting the hardboiled genre into a delusional distortion of itself, A Serpent Uncoiled is part crime, part magic realism, and wholly superb. The story is labyrinthine, with a deliciously deranged cast of characters, but the strength of the book is Spurrier’s endlessly creative prose. Barely three lines in, as the pigeons “choked in moronic bedragglement,” I was hooked.
For a statement on the geopolitical state of affairs, eschew the papers or the TV, and buy a copy of Alan Glynn’s Bloodland. It flits across borders and social castes, casting a gimlet eye over a vacuous celebrity culture, democracy as oligarchy, and the systematic looting of Africa. This is no mere essay though; Bloodland is a pulsating drama from start to finish. I was fortunate enough to meet Glynn earlier this year; the proudest possession on my shelves is a copy of Bloodland, inscribed for my daughter, that in the future she might better understand the year of her birth.
RJ Ellory was, bafflingly, subject to endless rejections from publishers, writing 22 books before getting his foot in the door of the literary world. Publishers told him there was no market for an English writer writing about America. As I closed the final page of Saints of New York, I was caught between marvelling at Ellory’s brilliance and laughing at the publishing industry’s Decca-esque failure to identify genius. Saints of New York is a tale of one NYPD detective’s redemption, fusing history, Mafia folklore, and philosophy, and driving the combination home with irresistible emotional force.
And finally, for me, 2011 has been the year of CJ Box. His consistently high level of quality makes it hard to pick just one of his books for the top 10, but the sixth in the Pickett series, In Plain Sight, is a deserving representative. A tale of a blood feud that tears apart the town of Saddlestring, In Plain Sight is the darkest of Box’s books, and represents the very best of his output; excellent characterisation, thematic complexity and an abundant love of his native Wyoming.
Overall, 2011 has been a fantastic year to be a Bookgeek… roll on 2012!
A second look at Lion of the Sun, by Harry Sidebottom
Looking in on different cultures and societies is always fascinating. The things people do, the things people believe, the radical differences in moral justifications they have for their actions is all just astonishing. So a question. As a member of one religion is an oath taken to the god of another religion binding? Is an oath taken under duress binding? Is the oath taken to the other god something that your own god will consider blasphemous and that you must under no circumstances obey? What if you make the same oath to both gods? These are the sort of questions Ballista, Warrior of Rome, has to deal with.
Deal with them he does, and in a thoroughly Roman fashion.
Total Immunity, by Robert Ward
Total Immunity is the ninth book from American thriller writer Robert Ward, and introduces a new hero, FBI Agent Jack Harper. Harper is cut from familiar cloth; haunted by past transgressions, struggling to maintain a relationship with his girlfriend, and with at best a tenuous grip on fatherhood. He is also a man’s man; partial to a drop of the old firewater and to nailing the bad guys to the wall.
The tale opens with Harper and his partner Oscar Hidalgo capturing infamous diamond smuggler Karl Steinbach, the culmination of a lengthy undercover operation. No sooner is Steinbach in custody, however, than he is volunteering information about Islamic terrorists in exchange for full immunity from prosecution. To make matters worse, he vows to wreak revenge on Harper, Hidalgo and the other FBI Agents involved in his arrest. As the bodies start to fall, Harper and Hidalgo are pulled into an increasingly dangerous investigation which stretches far beyond a mere smuggler’s vendetta.
The Angel Esmeralda, by Don DeLillo
Don DeLillo is one of America’s most acclaimed and influential novelists, with 16 novels spanning the past 40 years. But his writing career started a decade earlier with a number of short stories published in literary magazines. This is his first and only collection; nine stories cover the period from 1979 to 2011. The first two decades are not represented here – DeLillo had a prolific output in his early days and has admitted to feeling that his earlier works were written hastily. There would surely be room for a collection of these forerunners to see how his literary talent developed.
Of all his novels, Underworld (1997) is the most critically acclaimed, so it is fitting that this collection should take as its title story a piece later included in the novel. ‘The Angel Esmeralda’ is set in the deprivation and danger of the Bronx, where a small group of nuns and youth workers try to bring practical help to the residents. A young girl, Esmeralda, is noticed by one of the nuns – seen from a distance, never close up. But within days the girl is raped and murdered, just one more scarcely-known soul in this hopeless world.
And so she becomes an angel… Read more
Conqueror by Conn Iggulden
Conqueror is the final instalment in Iggulden’s series based on the line of Genghis Khan. Having followed the lives of Genghis, his sons and now his grandsons, the concluding chapter of this story centres on the life of Kublai.
This once again has the same mixed blessings as the original trilogy did – that many readers will have heard the name, but possibly know little or nothing about the man behind the legend. Iggulden approaches Kublai’s life with his customary flair. The characters are as well drawn as ever, the story captivating, and the pace of the narrative rarely slows from the first page to the last.
Death in a Cold Climate: A Guide to Scandinavian Crime Fiction, by Barry Forshaw
What Barry Forshaw doesn’t know about crime fiction, to borrow an old phrase, isn’t worth knowing. A journalist, chronicler of the genre, and talking head for the CWA Awards, with Death in a Cold Climate offering he covers in depth the extraordinarily popular sub-genre that is Nordic noir.
Often dismissed as shallow escapism, Forshaw recognises crime fiction for what it is – an art form. His prose is as lucid as any degree-level textbook, leaving the reader in little doubt as to the depth of Forshaw’s knowledge and understanding. The flip-side of this depth and lucidity is a complexity of language which may deter more part-time readers; Forshaw has a vast lexicon, and thinks little of deploying a Latin phrase or four. Read more
A second look at Divergent, by Veronica Roth
It is a new society. After a devastating war people have been divided into five factions which each specialise in one human quality. The factions are Amity for people who abhor violence, Erudite for those who yearn for knowledge, Candor for those who believe the truth should always be told, Abnegation for the selfless and Dauntless for the fearless.
Tris has lived in the selfless community of Abnegation for the first 16 years of her life with her parents and her brother. Now that her brother, Caleb, and she are sixteen they have to choose which faction they want to align themselves with for the rest of their lives. While most young adults will choose to stay with the faction they were born to, both Tris and Caleb choose differently. Caleb hunger for knowledge makes him move to Erudite while Tris leaves Abnegation for Dauntless. This one choice will change their lives because factions come before blood. The choice decides your friends, defines your beliefs and determines your loyalties… for ever.
On Conan Doyle: Or, The Whole Art of Storytelling, by Michael Dirda
Sherlock Holmes has been on stages large and small since his creation. Most recently, of course, he has been played by both Benedict Cumberbatch and Robert Downey Jr, and a new story has been added to the canon, penned by Anthony Horowitz. Behind Holmes, and often frustrated with the way this singular character came to dominate his life and work, sits Arthur Conan Doyle, his creator and often his greatest critic. Much has been written about Doyle, and even more about Holmes, but Michael Dirda’s On Conan Doyle is neither a straight biography nor an essay of literary criticism; it’s a love letter and a welcoming and warm introduction to a complicated and fascinating man.
It’s a slim volume, and makes no pretensions about being a complete life or review of Conan Doyle’s work. What it is is an enthusiastic, loving, and fascinating miniature of a man who has become defined by just one aspect of his life. Dirda revels in revealing a Conan Doyle who is more than the chronicler of Sherlock Holmes without ever losing sight of what an enormous impact that character, and his adventures, had on Conan Doyle and everyone around him. He spends time describing Doyle’s childhood, his adventures as a young man, but most of all he allows Doyle to speak for himself, via letters, stories, and novels and reveals the hidden tales of a life well lived (and a writer with a flair for the fascinating).
This is the sort of book that adds another stack to a To Be Read pile. Dirda’s sheer enjoyment of the many pastiches that Doyle inspired (including one by Wodehouse), the short stories that have been lost to the looming shadow of Holmes, and Doyle’s own collected letters, which contain gems like this:
“…writing home to his mother, Conan Doyle reveals his instinctive grasp for narrative pace and understated comedy: “We have had a great commotion here lately, from the fact that our third prefect has gone stark staring mad… They say that in his delirium he mentioned my name several times.”
Hero of Rome, by Douglas Jackson
Mr Jackson doesn’t seem to like his characters much. He keeps killing them off. Now obviously he can’t kill-off Tribune Gaius Valerius Verrens, that’d be hard to manage in the first book of a trilogy, but most everyone else comes to a sticky, blood-soaked end. Actually I don’t like his characters much either, the villainous Centurion Crespo is an especially nasty piece of work, so their various demises are generally quite welcome. Crespo’s deserts are particularly gruesome, and satisfyingly fitting.
Verrens is based in Colchester, Colonia, in around AD60, the fateful times when the Romans wiped out the druids they feared and hated so much and eliminated all record of their religion, what they worshiped and how they worshipped it. After a winter of road building, militia training and fraternization with the natives, in particular one Maeve, Verrens’ tour of duty in Britain is up and he’s sent back to Rome via London. But London hears rumour of a rising of the Iceni so sends him back to Colonia with a couple of hundred garrison troops to sort things out.
The Quantum Universe, by Brian Cox & Jeff Forshaw
Consider: “quantum mechanics is one of the three great pillars supporting our understanding of the natural world, the others being Einstein’s theories of Special and General Relativity.” If Einstein’s theories deal with the nature of space and time and the force of gravity, then quantum theory deals with everything else. Bearing all this in mind, you might well be expecting The Quantum Universe to be a bigger book. However, despite their brevity, Brain Cox and Jeff Forshaw do succeed admirably in their ambitious mission to show that everybody can understand the deepest questions of science.
Over the course of eleven chapters [there’s also an epilogue concerning the death of stars] Cox and Forshaw use The Quantum Universe to provide readers with a fascinating, up-to-date picture of the subatomic world. Taking an historical approach to explaining quantum theory, Cox and Forshaw begin by investigating what exactly is contained within the discipline of quantum physics and how it helps to facilitate understanding of the universe. They consider the work of the great and the good [Newton, Bohr, Heisenberg, Einstein, etc] and how modern understanding of quantum theory has impacted on these ‘classic’ principles of physics. Once this background has been thoroughly established, Cox and Forshaw go on to explain the core of quantum theory itself, considering issues such as why particles can be in two places at once, why movement is an illusion, how empty space isn’t empty and why we don’t fall through the floor. It’s fascinating and occasionally spooky stuff.
The Three Musketeers, by Alexandre Dumas
Set during the 17th century, The Three Musketeers follows the fortunes of D’Artagnan, an ambitious and precocious youth, anxious for adventure, and to be one of the king’s musketeers. Traveling to Paris, he finds himself in the company of Porthos, Athos, and Artemis, three of the king’s most infamous soldiers, gaining their trust and that of M. de Tréville, captain of the musketeers. As his fame rises, D’Artagnan finds himself drawn into a web of deceit and betrayal, crossing swords with the Cardinal and the fearsome Lady Clarick, and traveling between London and Paris to try to save the reputation of the Queen and foil the Cardinal’s plot to take power.
In the prologue, Dumas states that he was inspired upon reading a history of D’Artagnan that he borrowed from Marseilles library. From this first introduction to the character, he weaves a tale that is full of swash-buckling adventure and romance. Historical figures such as Cardinal-Duc de Richelieu and Louis XIII appear alongside the author’s own fictional characters, while there are also events such as the siege of La Rochelle and the Duke of Buckingham’s assassination by Fenton which are seamlessly woven into the story. It continually straddles this fiction/non-fiction boundary: evidently the author embellishes and adds his own stamp to the events and characters (the Cardinal, for example, is afforded more power in the novel), but many – including the musketeers themselves – are based upon real-life counterparts. Some of the set pieces that Dumas creates are brilliant, particularly the hilarious moment when the musketeers commandeer a run-down fort during La Rochelle, and casually have lunch while they defend it. There is a darker side too, with a harrowing beheading scene late in the novel, which takes place in Lille.
How It All Began, by Penelope Lively
Charlotte, a pensioner with an active mind but an ailing body, sits at her daughter’s house and watches time pass as she recovers from a broken hip. The mugging which has snatched away her independence kicks a host of other characters into new, exciting orbits, from budding romances to career opportunities. As they deal with the daily challenges they face, Charlotte stays still and reflects on her life. People come to her; excursions to the garden gate are momentous events.
How It All Began examines the idea that one small event can set hundreds of others into motion, connecting our decisions and misfortunes with the lives of people we’ve never met. It suggests, playfully, that this concept is a nexus between constructed narratives and the apparently random events that make up our lives. Unfortunately, this idea is never quite realised to its full potential: too often the novel makes it explicit, when it should have been wound through the core of the narrative, barely appearing on its surface.
The Islanders, by Christopher Priest
The Islanders is Priest’s first novel since 2002’s The Separation, which, in this fan’s view, is way too long. So, is this latest work worth the wait?
Presented as a fictional gazetteer interspersed with a series of short stories, it is set on various islands in the Dream Archipelago. Each island has a variety of names; official, local, patois, which may or may not hint at the nature of the island or its population. Many of the islands have distinct characteristics such as carved art installations or deadly insects or a history of isolationism. The reader should discover others themselves. Either side of the archipelago a traveller would find vast continents that are at war with each other.
Read more
The Prague Cemetery, by Umberto Eco
The Italian author (and established semiotician, thereby studying symbols, language and communication), Umberto Eco has crafted a fictional nineteenth century conspiracy embedded with actual historical characters, albeit the times lines are not strictly accurate.What he has created is a complicated puzzle, layered with red herrings intended to test the reader.
Quirky from the outset, the book has Eco as a narrator, following the fictional narrator Captain Simonini, a forger seeking to make his fortune, but needing to play with the fox and the hounds to accomplish this. Simonini blatantly prejudiced, is an anti-Semitic, seeing Jews as the route to all problems, but neither speaking warmly of the Catholic Jesuits or Masons either. Whilst involved in the creation of a book centred around religion, he seeks to create a coup to reap the finances he desires and political power to accomplish it. To do this he capitalizes upon such as the historical plotting of Jesuits against Freemasons. Part of this involves the nocturnal gathering of Rabbis in a Prague Cemetery, where they plot world domination – depicted in the title of the book. Eco cleverly uses historical occurrences as they could have been had they all happened as part of this unusual medley. But can one man really be the master of them all? Read more
Conman, by Richard Asplin
I hate Richard Asplin. Not in any mean or vindictive sense, you understand, this is purely the type of good-natured hatred one feels for those individuals who go around hogging all the talent. He’s a musician, stand-up comic, and also, it appears, a writer of ingenious con thrillers. In fact, I wouldn’t be entirely surprised to see him standing at the 100m finish line in London next summer, waving smugly at a trailing Usain Bolt. Given his evident love of spandex (well, spandex-wearing superheroes), this isn’t as unlikely as it sounds.
Conman opens with our hero, Neil Martin, struck by financial crisis. Martin is the owner of ‘Heroes Incorporated,’ a Soho comic book shop with a difference – the difference being the flooded basement containing its ruined inventory. Staring down the barrel of bankruptcy and resultant family ruin, Neil is desperate enough to listen when a con artist bends his ear, looking to bring him on board for a lucrative memorabilia-based sting. Read more
Shakespeare’s Mistress, by Karen Harper
There has always been great interest in the life of William Shakespeare. His work, his personal life, his inspiration and his birth have all been subject to endless re-imaginings. Shakespeare in Love, Anonymous and many other contemporary films, novels and biographies have all tried to piece together the man who was William Shakespeare and discover the truth about his early life.
In Shakespeare’s Mistress Harper portrays Shakespeare’s relationship with his first wife and true love, the mysterious Anne Whateley. Harper bases their relationship on a true historical document which recorded the marriage license of William Shakespeare and Anne Whateley, written just days before his second marriage to Anne Hathaway, who became the mother of his children. If this document is taken as fact Harper’s story of an affair between the two lovers may not be far from the truth – Shakespeare, forced to marry a woman he didn’t love, spent most of his time away in London with the woman he truly desired.
Solar System, by Marcus Chown
Sedna is the most distant known body orbiting the Sun, five times further out than Eris, ten times as far as Makemake and Haumea, five hundred times further than the Earth. And this book has a photo of it.
The last book I read about the Solar System was called Planets and was written by Carl Sagen for the Life Science Library in 1967. The Solar System had nine planets then, thirty-one moons, one star, one asteroid belt and extended out to just beyond the orbit of Pluto, around about 8 billion km. The A4 sized book had a couple of dozen small fuzzy and blurry photos of the planets taken at the upper limits of telescopic resolution and an awful lot of words. My interest in real astronomy started with that book.
The Dead Witness, by Michael Sims
It is with some embarrassment I must admit my ignorance in terms of Victorian fiction. My knowledge of the era extends largely to Stoker and Conan Doyle, with a smattering of national curriculum-endorsed classics. As such, to me Michael Sims’ The Dead Witness is something of a boon.
The Dead Witness: A Connoisseur’s Collection of Victorian Detective Stories is a title that could have been put together by Ronseal. It is a vast tome, weighing at nearly 600 pages, and featuring a smorgasbord of Victorian crime writing, encompassing both fact and fiction, and running the full gamut of writers from colossi like Dickens, Collins, Poe and Twain, to more obscure authors like William E. Burton; reprinted here for the first time in over 170 years. Read more
Christmas at Tiffany’s, by Karen Swan
With its New York winter wonderland front cover, and a title clearly inspired by Audrey Hepburn’s most famous film, Christmas at Tiffany’s is undoubtedly a book written for a female audience. Truthfully, I have always made a point of avoiding anything I think of as falling into the “chick lit” genre, but decided to break from tradition and try something different for the festive season.
In Christmas at Tiffany’s, Cassie Fraser suddenly leaves behind the only life she has known as an adult. Having married at twenty and spent the past decade with her husband in rural Scotland, she discovers his philandering betrayal. Shocked and heart-broken, she struggles to find her own identity, in an attempt to start building a new life. Cassie spends four months staying with each of her best friends in turn; Kelly in New York, Anouk in Paris, and Suzy in London. Leaving the quiet Scottish moors behind, Cassie is suddenly thrown into a hectic, materialistic, city-living world, with little idea of how to relate to it, or how to move on. Read more
The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern
The Night Circus, Erin Morgenstern’s début novel has been making splashes all over the book world since its release in September 2011. The story focuses on a competition between two master magicians, each pitting their champions against the other in a battle to the death. Hector’s daughter Celia, born of a casual liaison to a mother who took her own life after the magician’s abandonment, holds the ground for self-understanding as a method of magic. Marco was chosen from the orphanage to contrast and complement Celia perfectly, taught by Alexander in the style of complex runes and symbols to understand and use magic. The eponymous circus is the venue for their competition, unbeknownst to all the others employed by the circus, or any circus-goer, or even the man who created the circus. No one knows but them — at least for a little while.
The story is told in small chapters following Celia, Marco, various members of the circus family, and Bailey, a circus-goer. Some parts tell the chronological story of the competition and the circus, and other parts jump around to follow the life of our boy Bailey. The time jumps are a little confusing as they don’t begin until part way through the book and keeping track of the different events in different years can be a little confusing, especially before the book has brought together all the plot lines and revealed all of the mysteries.
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The Bookgeeks Interview
Simon Kernick
Simon Kernick is one of Britain’s most exciting new thriller writers. He arrived on the crime writing scene with his highly acclaimed debut novel The Business of Dying, the story of a corrupt cop moonlighting as a hitman. However, Simon’s big breakthrough came with his novel Relentless which was selected by Richard and Judy for [...]
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Latest Competition
Five copies of John le Carré’s Smiley vs Karla Trilogy to be won
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy was one of the big film releases of 2011, and to celebrate its release on DVD we have five copies of John le Carré’s Smiley vs Karla Trilogy to be won – consisting of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, The Honourable Schoolboy and Smiley’s People.
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