August 2008
At the Peak of His Powers

Sometimes you uncover treasures in the most unlikely places.

Nearly fifteen years ago, in the dusty back corner of a convenience store, I happened upon a VHS cassette of Heaven’s Prisoners.

Renting the bulky black tape and returning home to watch it on a small television beside my bed, careful not to wake my sleeping family—which included a newborn who wasn’t much for night sleeping anyway—changed my life.

The movie, starring Alec Baldwin, wasn’t bad, but by far the best thing about it was that it introduced me to James Lee Burke’s novels featuring his Louisiana detective, Dave Robicheaux. The timing couldn’t have been more perfect, as I was just getting serious about writing fiction.

And back then, all those many years and novels ago, I thought James Lee Burke was at the peak of his powers. But I was wrong.

From that time ’till this, I’ve read and reread the Robicheaux novels—from The Neon Rain to the latest entry in the long running series, Swan Peak.

As a writer, as a reader, as a southerner, I find James Lee Burke nothing short of a revelation.
Mr. Burke is one of the finest writers to ever pick up a pen, and over the course of seventeen Dave Robicheaux novels he has only gotten better.

Forget genre. Forget classifications. They don’t apply. Burke transcends every label, exceeds every expectation. Sure, he’s writing prose, but I’m not so sure it’s not poetry. Sure, his protagonist carries a gun and a badge, but these books are more literary novel than crime fiction.

How do I love thee, James Lee Burke? Let me count the ways. I love your sense of the South. I love your metaphorical mind. I love your complex characters. I love your imitation-defying descriptions. I love your passion. I love your politics.

James Lee Burke’s new novel, Swan Peak, takes Robicheaux far from his New Iberia roots, attempting to relax in the untouched wilderness of rural Montana. He, his wife, and his buddy Clete Purcell are visiting an old friend at his ranch, hoping to spend their days fishing and enjoying their distance from the grim, decaying landscape of post-Katrina Louisiana.

But the serenity is soon shattered when two college students are found brutally murdered in the hills behind the ranch where the Robicheauxs and Purcell are staying. They quickly find themselves embroiled in a twisted and dangerous mystery involving a wealthy, vicious oil tycoon, his deformed brother and beautiful wife, a sexually deviant minister, an escaped con and former country music star, and a vigilante Texas gunbull out for blood. At the center of the storm is Clete, who cannot shake the feeling that he is being haunted by ghosts from his past—namely Sally Dio, the mob boss he killed years before.

In addition to all the normal wonderful Burke treasures, which are on display in lush excess here, Swan Peak has the added pleasure of being far more about Clete Purcell than any of the previous novels.

By my calculations, Mr. Burke is approaching his seventy-third birthday, which I only find worth remarking because it’s a remarkable age for a writer to be at the peak of his powers, but make no mistake about it, at the peak of his powers Mr. Burke most certainly is. Of course, I thought that was the case fifteen years ago when I first encountered his writing, so it’s entirely possible I’ll be saying the same thing fifteen years from now.

 

July 2008
Cops and Cowboys

Environs change, but heroes stay the same.

Long before lone private eyes with heaters holstered beneath their seersuckers walked down the mean streets of uncaring urban back alleys, lone gunmen with six-shooters strapped to their waists walked down the dusty main streets of one-horse towns.

Listen to Raymond Chandler’s praise of the hard-boiled detective and tell me it couldn’t be applied to western gunslingers:

“Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.”

Chandler’s description of this type of hero could apply as much to Lucas Davenport as Virgil Cole.
Though technically a cop, Lucas Davenport has always functioned far more like the autonomous private detective Chandler was referring to.

In John Sandford’s 18th Lucas Davenport novel, Phantom Prey, a widow comes home to her large house in a wealthy, exclusive suburb to find blood everywhere, but no body—and her college-aged daughter missing. When the police can’t find the girl, alive or dead, and a second Goth is found slashed to death, Lucas reluctantly begins to investigate. The clues don’t seem to add up, though. And then there’s the young Goth who keeps appearing and disappearing: Who is she? Where does she come from and, more importantly, where does she vanish to? And why does Lucas keep getting the sneaking suspicion that there is something else going on here . . . something very, very bad indeed?

A little too long, Phantom Prey isn’t Sandford’s best Davenport novel, but it is a solid entry into the exciting series. As in previous novels, Sandford reveals the culprit too soon to suit me, but the pacing is fast, the writing clean, and it’s always good to spend time with Lucas Davenport, the cop, who in an earlier era would have been a western gunman.

If any modern detective fiction writer understands the relation between cowboys and detectives, it’s Spenser creator, Robert B. Parker. Not only is he the most popular and prolific contemporary writer of the private eye novel, but he has studied the form, its origins and evolution, extensively, even earning a Ph.D. in English literature with a dissertation on “The Violent Hero, Wilderness Heritage and Urban Reality.”

In Resolution, Parker leaves the urban reality of Spenser for the wilderness heritage of Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch—literary predecessors of the private eye.

After the bloody confrontation in Appaloosa, Everett Hitch heads into the afternoon sun and ends up in Resolution, an Old West town so new the dust has yet to settle. It’s the kind of town that doesn’t have much in the way of commerce, except for a handful of saloons and some houses of ill repute. Hitch takes a job as lookout at Amos Wolfson’s Blackfoot Saloon and quickly establishes his position as protector of the ladies who work the backrooms—as well as a man unafraid to stand up to the enforcer sent down from the O’Malley copper mine.

Though Hitch makes short work of hired gun Koy Wickman, tensions continue to mount, so that even the self-assured Hitch is relieved by the arrival in town of his friend Virgil Cole. In a place where law and order don’t exist, Hitch and Cole must make their own, guided by their sense of duty, honor, and friendship. Resolution showcases what Parker does best—exploring why hard-boiled men are the way they are. As usual, Parker’s prose is spare, his dialog-laden writing stripped-down and simple, which fits the western even more than the PI novel.

Linked by ethos, code, and honor, literary cowboys and private cops have far more in common with each other than either has with his contemporaries. Lucas Davenport could be in a western, just as Virgil Cole in a fedora instead of a 10-gallon hat and a trench coat instead of a duster could be in a hard-boiled detective novel.

Landscapes and fashions change. Heroes remain the same.

June 2008
First Time Novelist, Veteran Offer Stunning New Works

Child 44 is Tom Rob Smith’s first novel; Lush Life is Richard Price’s eighth—but in each case you’d never know it. Smith writes like a skillful old pro, Price like an enthusiastic new novelist. It’s hard to imagine these books being any different—or any better.

Set in 2003 in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Lush Life is as street as any literary novel can be. Richard Price knows the American city, understands its inhabitants—how they look, how they sound, how they interact, how and why they hurt themselves and kill each other.

In his first novel in five years, Price leaves the fictional Dempsy, New Jersey, where Clockers, Freedomland, and Samaritan were set, for a few bleak blocks of Manhattan.

When bartender Ike Marcus is shot to death after barhopping with friends, NYPD Det. Matty Clark and his team first focus on restaurant manager and struggling writer Eric Cash.

“So, what do you do?” Whenever people asked him, Eric Cash used to have a dozen answers. Artist, actor, screenwriter . . . But now he’s thirty-five years old, still living on the Lower East Side, still in the restaurant business, still serving the people he wanted to be. What does Eric do? He manages. Not like Ike Marcus. Ike was young, good-looking, people liked him. Ask him what he did, he wouldn’t say tending bar. He was going places—until two street kids stepped up to him and Eric one night and pulled a gun. At least, that's Eric's version—he claims them were accosted by would-be muggers, despite eyewitnesses saying otherwise. As Matty grills Eric on the still-hazy details of the shooting, the narrative shifts back and follows the lives of the alleged teenage shooters, Tristan Acevedo and Little Dap Williams, who live in a nearby housing project.
But the plot of a Price book is nearly irrelevant.

Lush Life, like the author’s previous books, is an intense, brutally honest look at life on the street, an examination of class and race and crime and history through literary characters so fully formed they seem more real than real, more human than any human you’re likely to encounter outside a book.

Lush Life is a lushly written—not in the purple prose, flowery sense—but in the multi-layered, richly conceived, fully developed Dostoevski way.

Speaking of Russian novelists . . . had Dostoevski been born later, he may have written a book like Child 44.

Except for a bit of a slow start and an incredulous, too tidy ending, Tom Rob Smith has written a remarkable first novel.

The repression of 1953 Russia provides the perfect cauldron for this literary detective thriller, for in Stalin’s Soviet Union “there is no crime.” It strives to be a paradise for its workers, providing for all of their needs. One of its fundamental pillars is that its citizens live free from the fear of ordinary crime and criminals.

But in this society, millions do live in fear . . . of the State. Death is a whisper away. The mere suspicion of ideological disloyalty-owning a book from the decadent West, the wrong word at the wrong time-sends millions of innocents into the Gulags or to their executions. Defending the system from its citizens is the MGB, the State Security Force. And no MGB officer is more courageous, conscientious, or idealistic than Leo Demidov.

A war hero with a beautiful wife, Leo lives in relative luxury in Moscow, even providing a decent apartment for his parents. His only ambition has been to serve his country. For this greater good, he has arrested and interrogated hundreds of innocent people.

Then the impossible happens. A different kind of criminal—a murderer—is on the loose, killing at will. At the same time, Leo finds himself demoted and denounced by his enemies, his world turned upside down, and every belief he’s ever held shattered. The only way to save his life and the lives of his family is to uncover the serial murderer. But in a society that is officially paradise, it’s a crime against the State to even suggest that a murderer—much less a serial killer—is in their midst.

Exiled from his home, with only his wife, Raisa, remaining at his side, Leo must confront the vast resources and reach of the MBG to find and stop a criminal that the State won’t even admit exists.
The most sinister villain of Child 44 is not the monster killing children, but the oppressive power of the state that is killing everybody. The implicit warning of this entertaining novel is that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely—a timely message for us today. Like the Russia of Child 44, we have far more to fear from our own government than any outside enemy they claim they must take our rights way to protect us from.

 

May 2008
When Good Writers Write Mediocre Books

It’s inevitable—unless you’re Harper Lee or Margaret Mitchell—write enough books and not all of them will be your best. The question for those of us who write and publish is just how not-our-best our not best books are.

I don’t know a single writer who starts out by saying, “I’m going to write a sub-par book,” but sometimes, despite our best efforts, they just end up that way. Writing a book is a long, idiosyncratic, arduous endeavor. The time between “Once upon a time” and “The end” is often several years. And no matter how long it takes, as authors, we’re not exactly objective about our work. That’s what editors, readers, and critics are for.

A good book is comprised of so many elements—good writing (dialog, descriptions, the use of language itself); interesting, engaging, three-dimensional characters; narrative drive; and resonance. It’s entirely possible—perhaps even probable—to achieve some of these while falling short on others.

The result:
From time to time, good authors write and publish mediocre books—books like Diablerie by Walter Mosley and Slip of the Knife by Denise Mina. It’s not that these are bad books. They’re not. They’re just not as good as the authors’ best work. In both cases, the writing and characterization is good, but there no real narrative drive—nothing that forced me to make a real investment in the plight of Ben Dibbuk and Paddy Meehan.

Diablerie is a kind of non-series follow-up to last year’s Killing Johnny Fry. Like Fry, Diablerie centers on a middle-aged man in crisis.

Ben Dibbuk has a good job, an accomplished wife, a bright college-age daughter, and a patient young mistress. Even as he goes through the motions of his life, however, inside he feels nothing. The explanation for this emotional void lies in the years he spent as a blacked-out drunk before pulling his life together—years in which he knows he committed acts he doesn’t remember. Then a woman from his past turns up at a gala for his wife’s new magazine called Diablerie and makes it clear that she remembers something he doesn’t. Their encounter sets wheels in motion that will propel Dibbuk toward new knowledge and perhaps the chance to feel again—if it doesn’t destroy his life first.

Darker, yet less erotic than Killing Johnny Fry, Diablerie’s protagonist is more complex, but, like his story, less compelling somehow.

Like Diablerie, Slip of the Knife if filled with good writing and interesting characters, yet doesn’t give the reader that powerful page-turning motivation to find out what happens next.

Set in 1990, the third novel to feature Paddy Meehan (after 2006’s Edgar-finalist The Dead Hour) Slip of the Knife finds the Glaswegian journalist embroiled in the most politically charged and personal story of her career. When the corpse of Meehan's ex-lover, journalist Terry Hewitt, turns up in the countryside near Port Glasgow, everything points to an IRA execution. After Meehan discovers that Terry willed her his notes and a house in the country, she decides to investigate his murder. Distracted by the imminent parole of Callum Ogilvy—the young cousin of her ex-fiancé convicted for his role in a child’s murder in Field of Blood (2005)—Meehan soon realizes that everyone from the Scottish police to the IRA is intent on keeping the motive for Terry’s death a secret. When Terry’s colleague is killed and her own young son is threatened, Meehan knows she must uncover the men responsible before she becomes their next victim.

The plot sounds interesting enough, but it’s just not compelling. Never once over the two weeks I spent with Slip of the Knife did I feel a pull back into the book. That’s sad to say about any book, but tragic to say of a book being billed as a thriller.

I’m not saying not to read Diablerie or Slip of the Knife. I’m not saying they’re bad. In fact, their writing and characterization are good. I’m just saying they’re not as good as they might have been, not as good as their respective authors are capable of. They fall flat because both of them are too easy to put aside and too difficult to return to.

 

April 2008
True Love or Just a Fling?—a Book for Every Booklover

Spring is in the air, and with it, the bloom of romance.

Whether you're looking for booklove or just a little booklust, the right book is out there for you. Two promising possibilities are Gregg Hurwitz's The Crime Writer (Viking, $24.95) and Benjamin Black's The Silver Swan (Henry Holt, $25.00).

A crime writer myself, I was first drawn to The Crime Writer by the title. Finding the premise intriguing, I entered the world of Drew Danner, an L.A. crime novelist who awakens in a hospital bed with a nasty scar and no memory of being found over his ex- fiancée's dead body.

Discovered holding a knife, her blood beneath his nails, Drew doesn't know whether he's guilty or innocent. To reconstruct the story, writer becomes protagonist, entering a nightmarish fictive world, living a plot as bizarre as the ones he writes, searching his Mulholland Drive-like memory and the city he loves and hates for evidence. Has the crime writer become a crime committer? Soon, Drew closes in on clues he may or may not have left for himself, and as another young woman is similarly murdered, he has to ask himself some very difficult questions.

The Crime Writer had a lot of potential—much of it unrealized. It's not a bad book, and it has moments that show what it might have been, but it too often lapses into crime fiction clichés and strains credulity to inane extremes—even by the sometimes absurdist standards of the genre.

As a writer and a character inside the plot, Danner observes, "A story doesn't have to be true, just convincing," and he's right. Ironically, that's where The Crime Writer fails the most. Where The Crime Writer succeeds is in capturing the shallower side of LA, "where a porn star runs for governor and an action figure wins," and in the creation of one of its more interesting characters, Caroline Raine, a scarred social worker/therapist whose too brief moments in the book are some of its best.

Readers, like lovers, come in all varieties, and those uninterested in serious commitment, who are just looking for a bit of fun, could do worse than The Crime Writer . So, If you like Pina Coladas and willingly suspending all disbelief; If you're not into realism; If you read for relief; If you like things that go bump at midnight, and the surreal setting that is LA, then The Crime Writer's what you're looking for; Read it to escape.

For book lovers looking for more, Benjamin Black's The Silver Swan might just be your bHarmony.com match.

Following last year's Christine Falls , the inimitable Garret Quirke returns in another well-written book—more literary novel than mystery, in which a young woman's dubious suicide sets off a new string of hazards and deceptions.

Two years have passed since the events of the bestselling Christine Falls , and much has changed for the introspective, formerly hard-drinking Dublin pathologist. His beloved Sarah is dead, his surrogate father lies in a convent hospital paralyzed by a devastating stroke, and Phoebe, Quirke's long-denied daughter, has grown increasingly withdrawn and isolated. With much to regret from his last inquisitive foray, Quirke ought to know better than to let his curiosity get the better of him. Yet when an old acquaintance comes to him about his beautiful young wife's apparent suicide, Quirke's penchant for cutting into the quick of things is roused again. As he begins to probe further into the shadowy circumstances of Deirdre Hunt's death, he discovers many things that might better have remained hidden.

Far more character study than whodunit, reading The Silver Swan is pure pleasure. Black's detailed, nuanced writing vividly brings his characters and the world they inhabit to startling, multi-dimensional life. With skill and subtlety, his observations reveal insight after haunting insight into humanity.

As evidenced in Christine Falls , The Silver Swan again demonstrates that plot is not Mr. Black's long suit—more means than ends—but it's not without twists and turns, and its psychological insights and fine writing more than make up for it.

If you're in the mood for a fling—a light entertaining affair—give The Crime Writer a whirl, but if you're looking for love, get to know Benjamin Black and his character Garret Quirke. You might just find a relationship that will last a lifetime.

 

March 2008
The Art of Adaptation

How does one art form become another? It's something I've been thinking about a lot lately.
For the past six weeks, I've been teaching a class at Gulf Coast Community College called The Art of Adaptation. In it, students in the educational encore program and I have examined the relationship between film and literature, how the latter becomes the former, how the former influences the latter.

This past year, I worked on two projects involving transforming short stories into short films. In addition to adapting my own short story, “Another Quiet Night in Desperation,” from a forthcoming collection of the same name, into a short film, I was also hired to adapt best-selling author, Max Lucado's story, “Wherever You Are,” into a short film that can be seen on the dvd, 3:16 Stories of Hope, which is in stores now.


Working on both projects reminded me how challenging and exciting adaptation can be and led me to develop the educational encore class.

For the six-week course, we examined a wide variety of adaptations from several different genres, and I thought I'd share some of them with you, then, because this is a crime fiction column, list what I believe to be the very best crime fiction adaptations.

I encourage you to read the books before you watch the films, but in every case, both are stellar, and you can't go wrong with either.

The best adaptations we examined in class were John Irving's A Widow for One Year, The Human Stain from Philip Roth's novel of the same name, Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove, Graham Greene's The End of the Affair , David Guterson's Snow Falling on Cedars , Steve Martin's Shopgirl, Michael Cunningham's The Hours , Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain , Nick Hornby's High Fidelity , and Charlie Kaufman's genius adaptation of Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief, chronicling his attempt at adapting an unfilmable book, the aptly titled Adaptation . These are examples of that all too rare occurrence of a good book being turned into a good film.

Now, turning to a life of crime . . . .

The following books and the films based on them all fit beneath the broad umbrella of crime fiction, and are some of the very best adaptations undertaken.


The Maltese Falcon . Adapted by John Huston (directing for the first time) from the 1930 novel by Dashiell Hammett. Sam Spade played to perfection by Humphrey Bogart. A dark, complex film noir adaptation of perhaps the best hard-boiled detective novel ever written. Unflinching. Unforgiving.

LA Confidential. 1950s LA. Clever, confident abridgement of Ellroy's novel. Far superior to the attempt at adapting The Black Dahlia.

Blade Runner . Film noir and science fiction. Atmosphere to spare. The future is bleak. Yet, the will to live is as strong as ever, and love is still possible.

Devil in a Blue Dress . Literate. Entertaining. Profound. African-American noir. So obvious. Why didn't someone think of this sooner?

The Russia House . James Bond finally grows up. Love in the time of Cold War. “You are my country now.”

Presumed Innocent . Just might be the best mystery/suspense courtroom thriller ever.

No Country for Old Men . Modern western. Good versus evil. Who wins? Time.

Zodiac. Age of Aquarius . 70s police procedural perfection. Not so much cops working on a case as a case working on cops.

Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window, Psycho, Strangers on a Train . Hitchcock. Enough said.

The Godfather . Not a fan, but recognize greatness when I see it.

Sin City . Esthetic perfection. Literal translation. As close to a filmed graphic novel as anyone's come.

Translating material from one medium into an entirely new one is enormously challenging, but it can be done—and done well. And when it is, it's nothing less than a work of art.


February 2008
Pulp Fiction Lollapalooza

The romantic in me imagines that the pulp fiction magazines I read began as north Florida slash pines like the ones that line our rural highways and frame our country dirt roads. I've also always wanted special editions of my books printed on paper produced from the pine trees of the panhandle that I write about, but that's another matter.

Pulp magazines or pulp fiction or “the pulps” were inexpensive fiction magazines published widely in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, though the term has also been applied to mass market paperbacks since the 1950s.
As I alluded to earlier, the name “pulp” comes from the cheap wood pulp paper used to print these magazines.

The distinctive covers of the pulps were printed in color on higher-quality “slick” paper, and were famous for their half-dressed dolls, dames, damsels in distress, and femme fatales.

By the time I was born, the pulps had gone the way of all flesh. I didn't grow up reading the writers whose words were printed on the cheap pulp paper glued between two glossy, colorful provocative covers as much as the writers they influenced. But, whoa Nelly! When I did discover these gritty predecessors of film noir, it was a revelation.

Now, thanks to Otto Penzler, legendary crime fiction editor and publisher and the proprietor of The Mysterious Bookshop in New York City, you, too, can discover or rediscover some of the very best pulp fiction written.

Weighing in at over a thousand pages, The Black Lizard Big Book of Pulps contains over forty-seven stories and two novels, including a never-before-published story by the prince of the pulps, Dashiell Hammett.

As the publisher says, this book is big baby, bigger and more powerful than a freight train—a bullet couldn't pass through it. Here are the best stories and every major writer who ever appeared in celebrated Pulps like Black Mask, Dime Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly, and more. These are the classic tales that created the genre and gave birth to hard-hitting detectives who smoke criminals like packs of cigarettes; sultry dames whose looks are as lethal as a dagger to the chest; and gin-soaked hideouts where conversations are just preludes to murder. This is crime fiction at its gritty best.

This stellar collection includes three stories each by Raymond Chandler, Cornell Woolrich, Erle Stanley Gardner, and Dashiell Hammett; two complete novels—one from Carroll John Daly, the man who invented the hard-boiled detective, and one from Fredrick Nebel,

one of the masters of the form; every other major pulp writer of the time, including Paul Cain, Steve Fisher, James M. Cain, Horace McCoy, and many many more of whom you've probably never heard; a foreward by Penzler; and introductions by Harlan Coben, Harlan Ellison, and Laura Lippman.

As Penzler says in his forward, like jazz, the hard-boiled private detective is an American invention—and who knows, without the pulps it could have been stillborn or died in infancy, never growing, like jazz, into a fully realized art form. Modern practitioners such as Robert B. Parker, Walter Mosley, and Dennis LeHane work in a house built by Chandler, Hammet, and Nebel—names we may never have heard of if not for the pulps. The Big Book of Pulps shows the birth, growth, and development of the genre. It lives up to its claim of being the biggest, boldest, most comprehensive collection of pulp writing ever assembled. If it were a different art form, like, jazz, say, it'd be nothing short of a lollapalooza.

 

January 2008
My Top 7 of 2007

Year-end Lists are strikingly subjective. Mine is no exception. Nothing to be done for it—except perhaps the act of acknowledgment.

Even if, in my review column, I strive for a certain measure of objectivity, I can't claim the same for a Top 7 of 2007. I've read only a tiny fraction of the crime books published this past year.

In addition to the above concern, there's the absurdity of trying to rank art. We're talking about works of imagination, expressions of the soul, not prize pigs, pies, or poultry in a county fair contest.

So what follows is not the best of 2007, but my top 7 recommendations of the crime fiction books I read last year—seven thrilling tales to get you through long winter nights.

All of the stories below have the elements crime fiction fans and afficionados expect—crime, suspense, mystery, thrills—but they are far more about people than plots. For me, criminology is psychology—character is destiny, and the best that fiction in any form offers us is the chance to meet new, interesting, and complex people, learning more about humanity in general and ourselves in particular in the process.

Though these recommendations are more or less in the order I would recommend them, you can't, IMHO, go wrong with any selection. One caveat, though, might be worth mentioning: My tastes tend to run toward the darker, grittier, mean streets side of crime and criminals. Love and respect to Miss Marple, there's not a cozy among them.

1. Mariette in Ecstacy

Mariette in Ecstasy is so well written, reading it is a religious experience. Its exquisite prose is so fine, so beautifully and carefully crafted, so delicate and precise, there's not a single superfluous word. That marks on a page can be transformed from letters to words, words to sentences, sentences to paragraphs, paragraphs to pages, so profoundly, is truly a work of art. That this work of art is in the service of such a sublime subject lifts it above the merely extraordinary into the transcendent.

2. The Road

Not with a bang or a whimper does the world end in Cormac McCarthy's The Road , but a "long shear of light and then a series of low concussions." Of course, it wasn't the end, only the end of the world we knew, and the beginning of a nameless father and son's journey down the long, nightmarish, seemingly unending, yet certainly dead end road known only as the road. This bleak backdrop provides the lifeless landscape of Cormac McCarthy's masterwork, a poetic post-apocalyptic parable, unflinchingly frightening, undeniably inspiring.

3. The Tin Roof Blowdown

Burke's trademark lyrical, dense, rich, poetic prose, southern gothic atmosphere, languid pacing, meticulous attention to detail, and seemingly unending sentences (like this one) are all on display in The Tin Roof Blowdown, and they've never been better suited to or served a story better than this tragedy set before the backdrop of Katrina.

4. Sharp Objects

Gillian Flynn's stunning debut novel is so sharp the tip of its blade nicks bone. Sharp Objects is as good a first novel as I've read in a very long time—maybe ever. Though promoted as a mystery/thriller, the book is far more a character study of its heroine, Camille Preaker, her sick family, and the sinister secrets small towns conspire to keep.

5. Killing Johnny Fry

With Killing Johnny Fry, Walter Mosley ( Devil in a Blue Dress , etc.), one of the most popular and prolific crime writers of our time, has created a remarkable new work that is being referred to as noir erotica by some and porn by others. In this highly sexual novel, the sex is not an end in itself, but part of an awakening by the protagonist.

6. Red Cat

Red Cat, the third installment (following Black Maps and Death's Little Helpers) in Peter Spiegelman's series featuring New York City private investigator John March, is neo-noir as good as any being written these days. With a troubled past and a job that attracts too much attention from the law, March has always been the black sheep of his staid merchant-banking family, which makes the identity of his latest client all the more surprising—his smug older brother David.

7. Hannibal Rising

Are monster's made or born? Opinions vary. Literary monsters are made—and few with as much care and detail as Thomas Harris' Hannibal Lecter. In Hannibal Rising, Harris shows how Hannibal was made a monster, but hints that the seed of the beast was in him from the beginning. In the age-old nature versus nurture debate, Harris seems to indicate that it's not just a lack of nurture, but actually something in the little Lecter's nature, that the cauldron of his horrific childhood drew out.

As a bonus, here are my top 7 crime movie recommendations of 2007:

1. The Lives of Others, 2. No Country for Old Men, 3. Gone, Baby, Gone, 4. Zodiac, 5. Fracture, 6. The Lookout, 7. The Dead Girl

 

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