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!

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