A shortlist of the best crime novels ever written is Anglophone-heavy and omits some works of genius
Anthony Hopkins in the film version of Thomas Harris's The
Silence of the Lambs: a baroque plot brought to life with intelligent
characterisation and fine prose Photo: Alamy
Jake Kerridge
Somewhere in Crime Writer Heaven I picture the shade of Raymond Chandler beaming at the news that the Crime Writers’ Association has voted two of his books among the 10 best crime novels ever written. Or at least he’s beaming until he looks at the other names on the Top 10 – and then I imagine, to use one of his own phrases, his smile becoming as faint as a fat lady at a firemen’s ball.
It would not please Chandler to know that novels by Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers are deemed the equal of his. “This is the type that is guaranteed to knock the keenest mind for a loop. Only a halfwit could guess it,” he said of the famously ingenious solution to the mystery in Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. He hated the unrealistic, fastidiously plotted murders that appeared in the novels of the English “Golden Age” writers: “The police … know that the easiest murder case in the world to break is the one somebody tried to get very cute with; the one that really bothers them is the murder somebody only thought of two minutes before he pulled it off.”
On the other hand, even Chandler’s most fervent admirers have to admit that there are times when he could have been less cavalier with his plotting. Howard Hawks, when making the film version of The Big Sleep, spotted an untied plot thread in the novel and sent Chandler a telegram asking “Who killed the chauffeur?” Chandler cabled back: “Damned if I know.”
Personally, I think it’s a cause for celebration that this list, compiled from a poll of members of the Crime Writers’ Association to mark its 60th birthday, has found room for writers as fundamentally different as Christie and Chandler. It is a reminder that crime fiction is not as formulaic as its detractors make out. That unlikely detective-story addict Bertolt Brecht once likened the critic who declares that all crime novels are the same to the ignoramus who thinks all black people look the same.
The 10 novels chosen by the CWA offer a course in the history of the crime novel’s development. The oldest books on the list – Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868) and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) – are vibrant melodramas, full of gusto and eccentric characters. By the time we come to Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) and Murder on the Orient Express (1934), violent death has become a parlour game, with plotting prized over characterisation.
Dorothy L Sayers, in The Nine Tailors (1934), and Chandler, in The Big Sleep (1939) and The Long Goodbye (1953), both wrestle in very different ways with the problem of giving the classical detective story the depth of a literary novel. And in the most recent books on the list – Martin Cruz Smith’s Gorky Park (1981), Thomas Harris’s The Silence of the Lambs (1988) and Reginald Hill’s On Beulah Height (1998) – we see a synthesis of the best elements of the earlier writers, with baroque plots being brought to life with intelligent characterisation and fine prose.
Most readers’ first reaction to the list will of course be astonishment that 600 professional crime novelists have been so dunderheaded as to include so-and-so at the expense of their own personal favourites. My fingers immediately itched to compile a retaliatory Top 10 of my own. The Moonstone earns a place – it’s as essential an accompaniment to a cold winter night as a log fire and a hot toddy. But – it pains me to say it – The Hound of the Baskervilles is so faultily constructed that its author would probably be blackballed if he tried to join the CWA today. I don’t dispute that Conan Doyle was the greatest crime writer ever, but he is at his best in his short stories.
Much as I admire the cunning of Christie’s early novels, I think she was at her best in one of her last books, Nemesis (1971). Scientists have suggested that the novel betrays signs of burgeoning Alzheimer’s in its elderly author and, yes, the murderer sticks out like Miss Marple on an 18-30 holiday, but the inability to construct the usual clockwork plot seems to have freed Christie to explore the themes of evil and retribution with rare power.
At the risk of being shouted down for sexism, I doubt many male members of the CWA cast votes for Sayers. The author famously fell in love with her sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey, an impossibly wealthy windbag who resembles no human being on earth, and many seemingly intelligent women readers have followed suit. No man should have anything to do with a woman who prefers Wimsey to Margery Allingham’s Albert Campion; he will never live up to her ideals.
What of the list’s omissions? The CWA may be a British organisation, but I am surprised that the books in its top 10 are all Anglophone. Anton Chekhov’s The Shooting Party (1884), his only full-length novel, ought to be on everybody’s lists: scientists have recently asserted that Chekhov is better for the brain than genre fiction – with this murder mystery you can combine the two. Georges Simenon was the greatest crime writer of the 20th century but was so prolific that voters will have been divided over which book to choose; I would go for The Stain on the Snow, one of the non-Maigrets.
Most surprisingly, there is no room for any of those Scandinavians who clog up the crime sections of bookshops and libraries in great snowdrifts: no Mankell, no Nesbø, no The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. If this was a list compiled by a Nordic crime writers association, two names would dominate: I have interviewed more than a dozen Scandi crime writers and every one has cited the brilliant Martin Beck series by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö as a key influence.
Unlike much crime fiction, especially today, none of the shortlisted books is humour-free; each has a few good jokes apiece. Nevertheless one would have liked to see one of the out-and-out crime comedians included, a Carl Hiaasen or a Christopher Brookmyre. (Reginald Hill, one of the funniest of crime writers, has had his most solemn book chosen; the jokes are better in his 1990 novel Bones and Silence.) And where are the books that playfully challenge our notion of what the crime novel is: Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose or Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy?
There is a whiff of the old-fashioned about this list. After all, one of the great innovations of mainstream crime fiction in the second half of the 20th century was the introduction of the anti-hero, the notion that it might be more interesting to write from the criminal’s perspective than the detective’s. Poor old Hannibal Lecter will be shunned at the awards ceremony, while the heroes of the other nine books, sleuths to a man, look down on him (perhaps he should just stay home and have a friend for dinner). Could a crime Top 10 worth the name really exclude Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley or Elmore Leonard’s Ordell Robbie?
Well, you will all have your views. Crime fiction is this country’s best-loved genre: the biggest-selling, the most borrowed from libraries. One thing we can say for sure is that every book on this list will have its passionate advocates. When the overall winner is announced on November 5, let us hope no blood is spilt.
Jake Kerridge’s top 10 crime novels
2 The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler (1953)
3 The Stain on the Snow, Georges Simenon (1950)
4 The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins (1868)
5 The Shooting Party, Anton Chekhov (1884)
6 Rum Punch, Elmore Leonard (1992)
7 Nemesis, Agatha Christie (1971)
8 The New York Trilogy, Paul Auster (1985-86)
9 Bones and Silence, Reginald Hill (1990)
10 Roseanna, Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö (1965)
The deadline for the £5,000 Telegraph Harvill Secker crimewriting competition is November 30
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