Several years ago, I turned my back on “literature”. Call me shallow, but I grew bored with the shallowness and complacency of most “serious” writers: the usual suspects- Umberto Eco, Milan Kundera, Michael Ondaatje, Kazuo Ishiguro, and my particular bete noire, Julian Barnes. None of their books seemed to be about anything I could care about. All their books seemed almost completely irrelevant, written with pen in one hand, dick in the other, one eye on a literary prize and the other on the approbation of their peers. Frankly, I thought literature was disappearing up its own arse.
And so I turned to crime fiction, seemingly the last bastion of plots, characters, and good honest clean prose - storytelling, in other words, stripped bare of literary posturing and conceit. I have never regretted the switch; I have gained much, and lost little. Here then are some of my favourites, in no particular order.
Jim Thompson. Bleak. Makes Albert Camus look like Peewee Herman. Try The Getaway, if only for the ending. Be warned, this is not beach reading.
James Lee Burke. The only author who makes descriptions of weather and scenery rivetting - don`t know if he knows, but he writes in iambic pentameter sometimes. Try Burning Angel - the only detective story to feature magic realism.
Carl Hiassen. Plots and characters can be repetitive, but completely addictive for his sheer anarchic glee. The man`s a moralist, too - bad punished, good rewarded. Try Stormy Weather.
Richard Price. Imagine Bonfire of the Vanities if Tom Wolfe knew what he was talking about. Probably the closest we`re going to get to the reportage-with-a social-conscience of Dickens. Try Freedomland.
Damon Runyon. No writer ever did more with the simple present tense - the P G Wodehouse of crime writers. Try From First To Last.
And, primus inter pares, The Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. This is where it all began, Wilkie Collins afficionados notwithstanding.
C