Recommended Crime
Yet again, the latest instalment of our recommended reading list. As always, if you'd like us to include your review amongst ours on these pages, please get in touch!
La Crème de la Crime
It's amazing how often a West End Lane customer will sidle away from our Crime section and slide their thriller sheepishly onto the counter, declaring ‘I do read proper literature too!’
Dearest customers, we're no stranger to the criminal impulse oursleves... but are unashamedly proud to declare ourselves lovers of crime. Some of the finest writers of the last two centuries have chosen this path and it's our pleasure to bring you a selection of our favourites: the hard boiled, the genteel, the stylish, the seductive; all quite astonishly brilliant, entertaining and guilt free.
Ian Rankin’s Rebus Crime Series
I can never decide whether the hero of Ian Rankin's series of crime novels is the hard-drinking, hard-thinking John Rebus or the city of Edinburgh. Rankin writes about what is my home town, with a rare insight. He understands its all too seamy side, rarely glimpsed by the annual invasion of Festival goers and tartan-mad tourists and he writes about it with the kind of love/hate that the place can inspire. How can a city of such soaring classical beauty be home to so much corruption, poverty and incipient violence? Unlike its rival city, Glasgow which wears its working-class earned success on its sleeve with pride, Edinburgh has always preferred to present itself as a city that does not like to get its hands dirty. But sometimes the pretence slips and the true murkiness behind much of its finance-driven elegance is revealed.
Rankin himself lives in the heart of the genteel lace-curtained suburbs where the in-joke is that sex is what the coal is delivered in but the world that his imagination inhabits is the raw gritty areas of the city where the local hoodlums, prostitutes and drug addicts carry on their daily trade. His novels are plotted with verve and tension and the dialogue is reminiscent of the glory days of hard-boiled American crime fiction - hence the tag 'Tartan Noir'. The character of Detective Inspector John Rebus is sympathetic and has charm in spite of his many flaws. His imperfections and curmudgeonly nature are what makes him so real and keep you on his side through his many tussles with both the criminal underworld and the powers that be within the police and the Edinburgh establishment. Little wonder then that the final Rebus novel "Exit Music" excited so much interest and concern that this might indeed be his lasting departure from our lives.
There are 17 different Rebus novels to choose from with the Detective Inspector ageing appropriately throughout. Villains also recur but it is not essential to read the books in order. Each one stands alone and sufficient explanation from Rankin fills in any gaps of knowledge from previous story lines. Try any from the selection in the shop and missing ones can always be ordered should you feel the need to go for the full set.
A Rage in Harlem / Chester Himes / £8.99 / 9780679720409
Chester Himes was the real deal. He started writing crime fiction while in prison for stealing jewels. His stories ooze the feel of the streets, streets of the 1950's that is. The use of dialogue and the grit-consumed settings were ahead of the times, yet most likely a welcome breath of fresh air for readers of crime and noir fiction.
This particular story revolves around a disparate and desperate bunch of lowlife hustlers and one man drawn in by circumstance. His name is Jackson, and his woman, Imabelle has a shady past.
So, from a deceptively simple setup an innocent God fearing man who appears to have lived his life on the edge of this corruption and crime falls further and further into the web that is wrapping itself tighter around him and his world. Much humour is squeezed out of the situations the characters find themselves in as the tangeable reality is stretched to the point of absurdity.How bad can things get for Jackson, is he ever going to catch a bit of luck.
The writing here has real spark and just falls on the right side of the sometimes contrived efforts in this genre at capturing the way people speak in a daily manner. Junkies, dealers, pimps and cops all cross paths and a feel of time, place and culture is given through the details of Jackson and his brother, who is also a 'sister', and their constant bickering; the drinking of cheap whiskey and eating boiled pig's feet with black eyed peas and rice “ Ain't nothin' but hoppin' john ”. These details are also in the community that plays as background to the tale. Later a scream is described as “shaking the entire tenement city, shaking the sleeping black people in their lice-ridden beds... the t.b. lungs.... the uneasy foetuses of unwed girls”. This continues for a full paragraph more and is a delight to take in.
As the story builds, hardbitten cops, the conniving hussie, out of towner crooks, they all come together and are all after the same thing in the end; survival. All concerned have that one thing in common, with a piggy in the middle. That piggy is Jackson and he sees the good in all around him. Especially his girl “ I know my Amabelle. She wouldn't do anything like that, I'd swear to it”.
Estrella Damn / Matthew Loukes / Soul Bay Press / £6.99 / 9780955955310
This debut novel from a fresh and individual voice in crime fiction unleashes offbeat gumshoe Slim Gunter on an unsuspecting London. Part-time sports writer and occasional private dick, this Chandleresque hero is very redolent of Robert B Parker's Spenser novels, with a dash of Hunter S. Thompson for good measure.
The all-pervasive black humour accompanies us through the back streets of a city that only Londoners would accurately recognise, with an excursion to Sussex for a change of scenery. With more similes than a lookalike convention, and a liberal sprinkling of bad (i.e. good) puns this has to be one of the most enjoyable reads of the year.
The second Slim Gunter novel, Goose Flesh, (Soul Bay Press P/B £7.99, 9780955955358) has just been published, and promises to be an even greater read.
Please note that both these titles are only avaible to order.
Lucie Whitehouse / The House At Midnight & The Bed I Made / Bloomsbury / £7.99 & £11.99 / 9780747596257 & 9780747590293
A new kid on the block, with these 2 debut thrillers to her name, Whitehouse, still in her early 30s, is already gathering fulsome praise from the critics--and it's easy to see why.
Both her debut, The House At Midnight, and this year's follow up, The Bed I Made bristle with tension from the get-go and share a similar structure by which layer by layer of small incidents build to a crashing climax.
With Whitehouse it's more a case of what-was-done than who-dunnit; in both stories it's the ambiguity of the situation that provides an elegant twist to proceedings. Either way, Whitehouse is well worth exploring and Midnight is an incredibly assured, beautifully contructed, debut with echoes of another stunning debut: Donna Tartt's beguiling Secret History.
