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…
Crime pursues the crime writer
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
Neil Jordan: as seductive a novelist as film-maker
The first and most important thing to say about The Drowned Detective is that it’s a very good novel and…
If you read one spy novel this year, read Real Tigers
Most spy novels have a comfortable air of familiarity. We readers can take moles in our stride. We have grown…
Count Dracula wasn’t always the vampire of choice
Nowadays a vampire is usually a Transylvanian in need of an orthodontist. But, as Nick Rennison demonstrates in this entertaining…
This way to a parallel universe, via north Oxford
As a novelist, Iain Pears doesn’t repeat himself, and he gives with a generous hand. In Arcadia, he provides a…
Brothels, hashish, a poisonous scorpion, a cursed necklace: all excuses for macho antics in the Valley of the Kings
Gore Vidal has form as a crime writer. In the early 1950s, when his sympathetic literary treatment of homosexuality had…
Murder on Grub Street
Historical fiction is sometimes accused of being remote from modern concerns, a flight towards nostalgia and fantasy. It’s not an…
Cybersex is a dangerous world (especially for novelists)
Few first novels are as successful as S.J. Watson’s Before I Go to Sleep, which married a startling and unusual…
Forget Poirot, Holmes or Marlowe: there is nothing urgent or even logical about Chilean detective work
If nothing else, a private investigator who has learned his trade from the works of Simenon stands out from the…
This autumn's crime fiction visits the Isle of Man and enters the Big Brother house
Phil Rickman isn’t unusual among crime writers for mingling supernatural elements with earthly crimes. What makes him different is his…
Hercule Poirot returns – and yes, he’s as irritating as ever
First, a confession. I have never cared much for Hercule Poirot. In this I am not alone, for his creator…
An unorthodox detective novel about Waitrose-country paedos
W.H. Auden was addicted to detective fiction. In his 1948 essay ‘The Guilty Vicarage’, he analysed the craving, which he…
Creepy, dizzying and dark: 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…
Maigret's new clothes – this month's best new crime novel, published 1931
The publisher has whipped up a tsunami of excitement around The Truth About the Harry Quebert Affair (translated from the…
You know something’s up when MI6 moves its head office to Croydon
Alan Judd’s spy novels occupy a class of their own in the murky world of espionage fiction, partly because they…
A Colder War, by Charles Cumming - review
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…
A thriller that breaks down the publishing office door
Like teenage children and their parents, authors and publishers have a symbiotic relationship characterised by well-justified irritation on both sides.…
Pick of the crime novels
Stuart MacBride’s new novel, A Song for the Dying (HarperCollins, £16.99, Spectator Bookshop, £14.99), is markedly darker in tone than…
Isabel Allende's Ripper doesn't grab you by the throat
Isabel Allende is not an author one usually associates with the thrillers about serial killers. Ripper, however, lives up to…
Have a crime-filled Christmas
Pity the poor novelist whom commercial pressures trap within a series, doomed with each volume to diminish the stock of…
Read any good crime fiction lately?
No Exit Press is not a large publisher but it has the knack of choosing exceptionally interesting crime fiction. Brother…
The Red Road by Denise Mina- review
Denise Mina’s 11th crime novel, The Red Road (Orion, £12.99), is one of her best, which is saying a good…
