AND FIVE CRIME WRITERS WE’D LIKE TO SEE AT NEXT YEAR’S BLOODY SCOTLAND

JOHN HARVEY

We’ve long been hoping that if there was a Marvel-style crossover in crime fiction,

Ian Rankin’s Rebus might take a trip to Nottingham and have a chat with Detective Inspector Charlie Resnick, the creation of John Harvey. Rebus and Resnick are more or less contemporary. Harvey’s Resnick novels, which began with Lonely Hearts in 1989 and concluded with Darkness, Darkness in 2014, are perhaps the best contemporary crime novels published in the past 30 years. A teacher before he turned to writing, Harvey was inspired by Elmore Leonard and Hill Street Blues to come up with a police procedural series that set the bar for many that followed. His more recent Frank Elder novels are nothing to be sniffed at either.

DERVLA McTIERNAN

One of our more recent discoveries, McTiernan only published her first novel,

The Ruin, in 2018. There have now been three Cormac Reilly novels, the most recent being The Good Turn, which is still to be published in the UK. Ireland is rich territory for crime fiction and McTiernan is a great addition to Irish noir fiction.

ANDREW CARTMEL

There is no more entertaining crime series right now than Cartmel’s Vinyl Detective series. Funny, full of recondite knowledge about music and the recording industry and proof that anyone – even a record nut whose main job is tracking down rare records – can be a great crime fiction protagonist. The latest in the series, Low Action, takes our hero and his mates into the world of punk. It also involves goats. These books are just begging to be turned into a Sunday night prime-time TV series. Get your finger out, BBC.

JILL DAWSON

Dawson might not be filed on the crime fiction shelves, but her smart, intelligent novels often explore the same psychological and geographical territory. Her 2016 novel The Crime Writer takes Patricia Highsmith (the creator of the Ripley novels) and inserts her into a mystery that she could have come up with herself. And The Language of Birds, Dawson’s most recent novels, is a fictional take on the case of Lord Lucan.

JOE LANSDALE

Lansdale’s novels are American rural Gothic but with a filthy humour and real heart. Best known for his Hap and Leonard novels, which are both laugh-out-loud funny and bitterly aware of race and class in modern-day America, Lansdale is a prolific and impassioned writer. We bet he’d be great to chat to in the bar too.