Today’s
guest blog is by author and journalist Stav Sherez. His first novel The Devil’s Playground was published in 2004 and was shortlisted
for the CWA John Creasey New Blood Dagger Award. His third novel A Dark Redemption was shortlisted for the Theakston's Old Peculiar
Crime Novel of the Year Award 2013.
Today he talks about his ten best crime novels we probably have never
heard of.
"If
you've ever bumped into me at a launch or a festival then I've probably told
you about one of these books. I probably
bored you senseless enumerating the merits of a novel you'd never heard of and
had already forgotten the title to. And
I'll keep on doing it, because these are the books that made me want to write
crime fiction. They fused everything I
liked about the literary novel with the energy and hypnotic storytelling of the
crime novel. I didn't pick them because
they're obscure. I picked them because
they are perfect novels in their own way.
I picked them because they make my brain fizz, pop and crackle with
ideas and possibilities. I read most of
these in the mid to late 1990s, before I'd written The Devil's Playground, and
they mapped for me what a crime novel could be and what a crime novel should be. These books are written in blood and grief
and stone. They will haunt your dreams
and crack your brain. They may even
change your life. They certainly did
mine."
1.
Eye of the Beholder - Marc Behm (No Exit)
Possibly the greatest PI novel
ever written, certainly the saddest, most lovelorn, and poetic. An unnamed private detective spends decades
hunting a female serial killer. Unfortunately,
he falls in love with her. The novel
spans years and roams across the great empty spaces of the American West. An existential shudder of a book, a ghost
story and murder mystery with a last paragraph that will leave you bawling and
broken.
2.
The Dogs of Winter - Kem Nunn (No Exit)
If Cormac McCarthy and Robert
Stone decided to collaborate on a crime novel about surfers then Dogs of Winter would be it. An unforgettable journey through the
wilderness of northern California following a washed-up surfer and a failed photojournalist
as they try to find a mythical, hidden beach.
Lost girls, crazed Indians, old hauntings and a malevolent sense of
landscape make this a Deliverance for
the stoner generation.
3.
God is a Bullet - Boston Teran
If Cormac McCarthy had written a
Satanist-cult crime novel... (And maybe
he has, because no one knows who Boston Teran really is). Electric prose and one of the darkest
descents into hell ever put on the page.
A Dantescan nightmare in the scorch & sizzle of the American
Southwest. A small-town cop who's lost
his daughter to a Satanist cult gets together with a woman who's escaped from
its clutches. Together they cross the
desert searching for the cult, unleashing hell and bullets as they step into an
existential blood storm.
4.
Cutter and Bone - Newton Thornburg (Serpent's Tail)
To
Die in California
may be an even better Thornburg novel but this is the place to start. Easy
Rider crossed with Chandler. The
dregs of the American dream, Vietnam and the counter-culture, collide in this
elegiac portrayal of two outsiders who come face to face with the realisation
of the dream in what must be one of the most nihilistic endings to any novel
ever.
5.
Cold Caller - Jason Starr (No Exit)
Jason Starr writes lean,
demonically dark noirs that leave you breathless and brain reeling. There is not a hint of pastiche in his books. If the definition of noir is "You're
fucked on page one and it only gets worse from there" then Starr's books
are the best exemplars of this.
6.
A Coffin for Dimitrios - Eric Ambler (Penguin)
The best Ambler and perhaps the
greatest spy novel of the classical period.
A bored crime writer living in Istanbul gets obsessed with the death of
a famous brigand and crosses pre-war Europe in search of the story behind the
man. A deft meta-fictional exploration
of the gap between reality and its representations, between being a crime
writer and crime itself, and a scorched-earth history of Europe’s genocidal
heart.
7.
Legends - Robert Littell (Duckworth)
If Philip K Dick had written a
spy novel the results may have been close to this. Ranging across continents and decades,
dropping into civil wars and revolutions, from the chill of Stalin's Moscow to
a meeting with Bin Laden in Paraguay, this is a profound meditation on identity
and lies, reality, narrative and how we make sense of the world, cocooned in an
incredibly gripping and experimental structure.
8.
Love Remains - Glen Duncan (Granta)
Not strictly a crime novel but
its heart is as black as the blackest noir.
Duncan is perhaps Britain's foremost prose stylist and this descent into
the hell of relationships, responsibilities, and casual violence rushes towards
its gloriously bleak and bitter ending with the electric raw energy of the best
crime fiction. The dark heart of a
relationship, mapped out decades before Gone Girl.
9.
Tomato Red - Daniel Woodrell (No Exit)
A striking and poignant look at
busted lives and the inevitabilities that we all succumb to. Woodrell writes like a demented angel and
delivers a last page that will leave you shaking and screaming in your seat.
10.
Southern Nights - Barry Gifford (Canongate)
An insanely surreal addictive
and funny and wild and crazed baton race of evil, depravity, blood, and dark
longing, this trilogy has it all and much much more.
Agree? Don't agree?
Find me @stavsherez
You can also find out more about Stav and his work at http://stavsherez.com/
Former
homicide detective and CIA agent Lemuel Gunn left behind the Afghanistan
battlefield for a trailer in New Mexico to forge a new career as a private
investigator. Out of nowhere comes
Ornella Neppi, a woman making a mess of her uncle's bail bonds business. She asks Gunn to track down the source of her
troubles, a man named Emilio Gava, who has jumped bail after being arrested for
buying cocaine. But no photos of Gava
seem to exist. As Gunn begins his search
for a man it seems that someone is protecting, hitting dead end after dead end,
he starts to suspect that Gava might not exist at all - The grittiest novel yet
from the masterful Robert Littell, A
Nasty Piece of Work is unmissable, powerful reading. As Gunn's game of cat and mouse unfolds -
every step leading him closer to the truth - he draws ever closer to an unseen
enemy's line of fire. A Nasty Piece of Work is due to be
published in March 2014
Dry Bones is the third book in Fintan Dunne trilogy by Peter
Quinn and is due to be published in April 2014.
Fintan Dunne, the detective at the centre of The Man Who Never Returned
and Hour of the Cat, is back in this spellbinding story of an ill-fated OSS
mission into the heart of the Eastern front and its consequences more than a
decade after the war's end. As the Red
Army continues its unstoppable march towards Berlin in the winter of 1945,
Dunne and his fellow soldier Dick Van Hull volunteer for a dangerous drop
behind enemy lines to rescue a team of OSS officers trying to abet the Czech
resistance. When the plan goes south,
Dunne and Van Hull uncover a secret that will change both of their lives. Years later, Dunne is drawn back into the
shadowy realm of Cold War espionage in an effort to clear his friend's name and
right an injustice so shocking that men would, quite literally, kill to keep it
quiet.
In
1856, a baying crowd of over 30,000 people gathered outside Stafford prison to
watch the execution of a village doctor from Staffordshire. One of the last people to be publicly hanged,
the 'Rugely Poisoner', the 'Prince of Poisoners', 'The greatest villain who
ever stood trial at the Old Bailey,' as Charles Dickens described him, Dr
William Palmer was convicted in 1855 of murdering his best friend, but was
suspected of poisoning more than a dozen other people, including his wife,
children, brother and mother-in-law - cashing in on their life insurance to
fund his monstrously indebted gambling habit.
Highlighting Palmer's particularly gruesome penchant for strychnine, his
trial made news across Europe: the most memorable in fifty years, according to
the Old Bailey's presiding Lord Chief Justice.
He was a new kind of murderer - respectable, middle class, personable,
and consequently more terrifying - and he became Britain's most infamous figure
until the arrival of Jack the Ripper. The
first widely available account of one of the most notorious, yet lesser-known,
mass-murderers in British history, The
Poisoner takes a fresh look at Palmer's life and disputed crimes,
ultimately asking 'just how evil was this man?’
With previously undiscovered letters from Palmer and new forensic
examination of his victims, Stephen Bates presents not only an astonishing and
controversial revision of Palmer's entire story, but takes the reader into the
very psyche of a killer. The Poisoner is due to be published in
June 2014.
In
February 2014, Duckworth Overlook is due to publish The Miernik Dossier and The Last
Supper by Charles McCarry. In The Miernik Dossier Cool, urbane Paul
Christopher is the perfect American agent, currently working in deep cover in
the twilight world of international intrigue.
But now even he cannot tell good from bad in a maze of double and
triple-crosses. As a group of
international agents embark on a trip in a Cadillac from Switzerland to the
Sudan, Christopher knows that he has to find out which one is about to unleash
bloody terrorism - and God help everyone if he makes a mistake. In The
Last Supper on a rainy night in Paris, Paul Christopher's lover Molly
Benson falls victim to a vehicular homicide minutes after Christopher boards a
jet bound for Vietnam. To explain this
senseless murder, The Last Supper goes back not only to the earliest days of
Christopher's life, but also to the origins of the CIA. Moving seamlessly from tales of refugee
smuggling in Nazi Germany to OSS-coordinated guerrilla warfare in Burma and the
confusion of the Vietnam War, McCarry creates an intimate history of this
shadow-world of deceit and betrayal.
