Customer Reviews

A good guide but some flaws in the coverage - By: Rimbaud, 30 Jun 2007
This is a useful book for both crime afficionados wanting tips on some more obscure new directions & for newcomers who just want to know where to start.

Each chapter recommends & reviews a selection of crime novels (over 200in total) & there are the usual Rough Guide boxes & sidebars on related areas such as films, author profiles & crime genres. The chapters are organised thematically & range from the origins of crime fiction (Edgar Allan Poe, Conan Doyle) & the 'golden age' (Christie, Allingham, Sayers) through hard-boiled (Chandler, Hammett, Thompson) to more contemporary genres such as police procedural, espionage, serial killers, organized crime etc. The reviews maintain a fine balance between criticism & enthusiasm & cleverly avoid the 'spoiler' pitfalls of revealing too much plot.

The book is much stronger on contemporary writers & most of the selections are books publishedin the last 30 years so if you want lots of recommendations for 'classic' golden age novels then you would be better served looking elsewhere. Despite the focus on the contemporary, the book has several flaws - it is fairly weak on foreign fiction despite there being one chapter devoted to this & contains nothing on important writers such as Jean-Patrick Manchette, Peter Hoeg, Jo Nesbo, Ake Edwardson, Janwillem van de Wetering, Manuel Vazquez Montalban, Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza, Massimo Carlotto, Jose Carlos Somoza etc. There are also a number of important contemporary writers who are also absent (the outstanding John Franklin Bardin, Don Winslow, Jonathan Lethem, Christopher Fowler, Andrew Vachss, Jeff Lindsay, Reginald Hill, Ken Bruen, Shane Stevens etc). While there will always be constraints on who to include because of space considerations, I find it strange that writers of this calibre were omitted & yet space was found for hacks such as Andy McNab, Chris Ryan & Michael Crichton. There are also a number of errors (The Godfather was publishedin 1969 not 1978, it's Iain not Ian Sinclair, Rankin's 2006 book was The Naming of the Dead etc.) but these are minor quibbles.

In summary a good first attempt & I hope that it is successful enough for a 2nd edition to include some of the great writers above. Oh, & where is Face on the Cutting Room Floor...?