Book ’em, Danno!
We round up some of the most buzzworthy crime fiction novels released in 2019
Crime fiction continues to flourish at a time when the future of literary fiction looks less secure than that of the Amazon rainforest. This may explain why it’s been a vintage year for caustic dismissals of crime from literary writers (Colm Toibin, Lucy Ellmann). If the crime writers have been crying all the way to the bank, the tears have been genuine. They are quite right to feel that a genre with which readers have engaged so widely and deeply deserves better than sour grapes.
It is difficult to think of any novel published this year that engages more urgently with the world we live in than Don Winslow’s The Border (Harpercollins Canada), the barnstorming conclusion to his Cartel trilogy, which has the epic ambition of demonstrating just how thoroughly the counterproductive “war on drugs” waged by successive U.S. governments has poisoned the U.S. and Mexico. His facts are impeccable, but this is more than dramatized journalism: it’s a raucous work of art.
The thriller that hogged the headlines this year was Cari Mora (Grand Central), Thomas Harris’s first novel in 13 years. His often gorgeous prose cried out to be expended on something more substantial than this featherlight comic caper with nuggets of self-parody. It was far from a disaster, but any Harris novel that doesn’t give you nightmares is going to leave you as disappointed as Hannibal Lecter on learning that the waiters aren’t included in the all-you-can-eat buffet. There was a much happier return to crime, after a decade’s absence, for Kate Atkinson.
Big Sky (Penguin Random
House Canada) resurrects her world-weary detective, Jackson Brodie, whose quixotic attempts to redress a tiny fraction of the wrongs committed against women by men seemed timelier than ever.
Atkinson has an invigoratingly cavalier attitude to the conventions of the detective novel, and the same is true of two of the year’s outstanding police procedurals. In Throw Me to the Wolves (Bloomsbury), Patrick Mcguinness tells the story of an oddball teacher hounded by the press after being accused of murder. Although much of the novel’s piquancy stems from its reflections on real-life events (it’s based on the case of Christopher Jefferies, by whom Mcguinness was taught as a boy), it’s his Anglo-dutch detective’s eccentric approach to the investigation that lingers most in the mind. An equally memorable new cop on the literary beat is Robin Lyons, dismissed from the Met for misconduct and living back with her parents in Birmingham, in Lucie Whitehouse’s irresistibly funny and pacy Critical Incidents (Fourth Estate).
It was a fine year for historical crime fiction, with many books that were as enlightening as they were exciting. If you really want to understand why the British public came around so rapidly to the idea of abolishing slavery, read Laura Shepherd-robinson’s enthralling Blood and Sugar (Mantle), while Abir Mukherjee’s Death in the East (Penguin Random House Canada) will tell you a great deal about how the British lost their grip on India while leaving you gurgling with pleasure at the fun of a lost world. Robert Harris’s The Second Sleep (Penguin Random House Canada) appears to be set in medieval England, but in fact there’s an ingenious twist that shows his imagination is stretching itself to a degree it hasn’t quite managed since Fatherland.
Currently the most popular crime sub-genre, or at least the most heavily promoted, is domestic suspense. As my late friend Marcel Berlins, long-serving crime critic of The Times, used to point out, nine out of 10 of these books are shameless ripoffs of Rebecca. But I think even he would have enjoyed Phoebe Locke’s The July Girls (Wildfire), which is told from the perspective of a little girl whose father may or may not be a serial killer, and happily moves the genre away from its usual middle-class milieu.
My saddest reading experience this year was finishing Metropolis (Penguin Random House Canada), the last thriller written by Philip Kerr before his untimely death in 2018. It’s a prequel to his great series about the German PI Bernie Gunther, set in 1928 Weimar, and shows what turned Bernie into the wisecracking misanthrope we love.
Kerr wrote with the blackest of humour, which is no doubt why he found such a large and appreciative audience. So let me end by recommending three more books written in the spirit of laughter in the dark: Denise Mina’s Conviction (Mulholland), a hilarious road trip around Europe in pursuit of a possible murderer by two people thrown together when their spouses elope; William Boyle’s acidulously funny A Friend Is a Gift You Give Yourself (Penguin Random House Canada), about three Brooklyn women on the run from the Mob; and Helen Fitzgerald’s blissfully scabrous Worst Case Scenario (Orenda), in which the onset of menopause leads a social worker’s life to unravel in disastrous and liberating ways.