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Jump to navigationJump to searchCrime & Mystery: The 100 Best Books by H R F Keating (view source)
Revision as of 12:52, 7 March 2018
, 12:52, 7 March 2018no edit summary
The format is simple. Keating, himself a mystery writer of some distinction, has chosen what he thinks are the hundred best crime and mystery books. He admits that the choice is purely personal and that virtually everyone will be astounded at an omission or annoyed at an inclusion. Some authors appear two or even three times, others only once, and the choice runs from Edgar Alan Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination published in 1845 through to P.D. James' A Taste for Death from 1986. It's a very good book, but there are one or two problems which I'll get out of the way before I sing the praises.
The first is that it is a little out-of-date. The books reviewed are good, many are excellent, but quite a few are difficult to find. Some authors have not reached their peak and the books chosen do not represent their best. Reginald Hill's [[A Pinch of Snuff]] is good but [[On Beulah Height]], published in 1998 is much better. Similarly, Ruth Rendell's [[A Judgement in Stone]] is bettered by some of her later work. Some excellent crime novelists had not yet come to prominence. The first Rebus novel, [[Knots And Crosses]] wasn't published until March 1987, so Ian Rankin is a notable omission, as is Michael Dibdin with his Aurelio Zen books. This is probably not too important as Keating doesn't suggest that the selection is definitive - just that these books are his favourites.
The next problem is a little more serious: there are quite a few spoilers. Occasionally we're told much too much as in the case of Agatha Christie's [[The Murder of Roger Ackroyd]] where I suspect that there would be little pleasure in reading the book once you knew the name of the murderer. Admittedly this would have been a difficult book to review without giving away so much of the plot, but it might have been better to leave it out than to reveal all. Occasionally there were lesser disclosures where I found myself thinking that I would have preferred not to know that there was an important clue in the first twenty pages or something similar.
