Come on guys, stop sticking the knife in

Literary novelists still love to dismiss crime fiction but it has become the cutting-edge genre, says Jake Kerridge

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 Tóibín, 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, £20), 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 American governments has poisoned the US and Mexico. His facts are impeccable, but this is more than dramatised journalism: it’s a raucous work of art.

The thriller that hogged the headlines this year was Cari Mora (William Heinemann, £20), 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-caneat buffet. There was a much happier return to crime, after a decade’s absence, for Kate Atkinson. Big Sky (Doubleday, £20) resurrected 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 (Jonathan Cape, £14.99), Patrick McGuinness tells the story of an oddball teacher hounded by the press after being accused of murder, but although much of the novel’s piquancy stems from its reflections on real-life events (it is based on the case of Christopher Jefferies, by whom McGuinness was taught as a boy), it is his Anglo-Dutch detective’s eccentric approach to the investigation that lingers most in the mind. An equally memorable new copper 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, £12.99).

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, £14.99), while Abir Mukherjee’s Death in the East (Harvill Secker, £14.99) 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 (Hutchinson, £20) 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 subgenre, 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 rip-offs of Rebecca; but I think even he would have enjoyed Phoebe Locke’s The July Girls (Wildfire, £16.99), 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 middleclass milieu.

Lauren Wilkinson reclaimed the espionage thriller with her gripping, pawky American Spy (Dialogue, £14.99), which has an African-American heroine instead of the usual posh, white men. It’s in stark contrast to John le Carré’s entertaining Agent Running in the Field (Viking, £20) which has the standard patrician le Carré hero, albeit one who has blotted his copybook and is demoted to running a shabby subset of MI6 that seems almost an homage to Mick Herron’s dumping ground for failed spies, Slough House. You can compare the two by reading Herron’s glorious Joe Country (John Murray, £14.99). My favourite espionage thriller, however, was A Long Night in Paris (MacLehose, £8.99) by the Israeli author and ex-spy Dov

Alfon, which managed to bring a cracking pace to its geopolitics, and a light touch to its cynicism.

My saddest reading experience this year was finishing Metropolis (Quercus, £8.99), 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

Crime writers may be crying all the way to the bank, but their tears are genuine

could spark a movement, try Witch by Rebecca Tamás (Penned in the Margins, £9.99), in which a witch meets God, bonks the devil and smashes the patriarchy. Outrageous and ambitious, parts of it don’t work, but the bits that do are dynamite. Along with Fran Lock’s image-packed Contains Mild Peril (Outspoken, £9.99) and Heather Phillipson’s whip-smart and glitchy Whip-hot & Grippy (Bloodaxe, £12), it’s at the centre of a school I tentatively labelled the New Witchcraft in these pages; they’re all deliciously OTT, and have urgent things to say. Indecisive? The Forward

Book of Poetry (Bookmark, £9.99) has poems by Sexton, Galleymore and Bernard – as well as from Fiona Benson’s brilliantly chilling Vertigo & Ghost (Cape, £10). Flick to a random page, take a deep breath, and dive in.