A crime novel that continues to puzzle
His Bloody Project, Graeme Macrae Burnet’s previous novel, had the sort of success that most authors and creative writing students…
Apostle of gloom
Few people turn to Henning Mankell’s work in search of a good laugh. He’s best known as the author of…
A blast from the past
If you had to choose one book that both typified spy fiction and celebrated what the genre was capable of…
There’s no escape
Patricia Highsmith was an accretion of oddities — a woman who doted on her pet snails and carried a selection…
Who killed murder?
The mystery of violent crime’s dramatic decline
A leap in the dark
The first and most important thing to say about The Drowned Detective is that it’s a very good novel and…
Escaping the Slough of despond
Most spy novels have a comfortable air of familiarity. We readers can take moles in our stride. We have grown…
Multi-fanged
Nowadays a vampire is usually a Transylvanian in need of an orthodontist. But, as Nick Rennison demonstrates in this entertaining…
Universal appeal
As a novelist, Iain Pears doesn’t repeat himself, and he gives with a generous hand. In Arcadia, he provides a…
Gore blimey
Gore Vidal has form as a crime writer. In the early 1950s, when his sympathetic literary treatment of homosexuality had…
A mingling of blood and ink
Historical fiction is sometimes accused of being remote from modern concerns, a flight towards nostalgia and fantasy. It’s not an…
Addicted to trouble
Few first novels are as successful as S.J. Watson’s Before I Go to Sleep, which married a startling and unusual…
A Latin American shaggy-dog story
If nothing else, a private investigator who has learned his trade from the works of Simenon stands out from the…
Recent crime fiction
Phil Rickman isn’t unusual among crime writers for mingling supernatural elements with earthly crimes. What makes him different is his…
… and another is resurrected
First, a confession. I have never cared much for Hercule Poirot. In this I am not alone, for his creator…
Under cover in the underworld
W.H. Auden was addicted to detective fiction. In his 1948 essay ‘The Guilty Vicarage’, he analysed the craving, which he…
A choice of recent crime fiction
Philip Kerr is best known for his excellent Bernie Gunther series about a detective trying to survive with his integrity…
Recent crime novels
The publisher has whipped up a tsunami of excitement around The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair (translated from the…
Quiet, calm consideration…
Alan Judd’s spy novels occupy a class of their own in the murky world of espionage fiction, partly because they…
Love and betrayal
The title of Charles Cumming’s seventh novel is both a nod to the comfortable polarities of Cold War and also…
Recent crime fiction
Louise Welsh rarely repeats herself, a quality to celebrate in a crime novelist. Her latest novel, A Lovely Way to…
Booked for murder
Like teenage children and their parents, authors and publishers have a symbiotic relationship characterised by well-justified irritation on both sides.…
Recent crime fiction
Stuart MacBride’s new novel, A Song for the Dying (HarperCollins, £16.99, Spectator Bookshop, £14.99), is markedly darker in tone than…
Corpses and clichés
Isabel Allende is not an author one usually associates with the thrillers about serial killers. Ripper, however, lives up to…
A choice of crime fiction
Pity the poor novelist whom commercial pressures trap within a series, doomed with each volume to diminish the stock of…
