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Jump to navigationJump to searchCrime & Mystery: The 100 Best Books by H R F Keating (view source)
Revision as of 12:57, 7 March 2018
, 12:57, 7 March 2018no edit summary
Right - that's the problems out of the way. What we're left with is a very good book with an engagingly simple format. Each of the hundred book is reviewed over two pages (oh, what skill to be able to do that consistently) and we get a concise overview of the author's oeuvre and any relevant background followed by details of the book itself. Sometimes this includes quotations and there's usually an analysis of the plot. Each review is incisive and there's rarely, if ever, a spare word. Humour plays its part and any criticism is light - but then it probably would be if you were choosing a hundred favourite books.
So, what of Keating's choices? There's a good mixture of books published both in the UK and the USA with the occasional book (such as Simenon's 'Maigret') which would originally have been written in a language other than English. Some books which laid the foundations for the genre could not be omitted - ''Tales of Mystery and Imagination'', for instance or Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone, Charles Dickens' The Mystery of Edwin Drood and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. From the early part of the twentieth century we have such luminaries as G K Chesterton, Edgar Wallace, Agatha Christie and Dorothy L Sayers as well as some more unusual choices such as James M Cain's [[The Postman Always Rings Twice]] and ''The Wheel Spins'' by Ethel Lina White.
It's as we move into the golden age of crime fiction that the selections become exciting. I found some of my personal favourites: [[Before the Fact]] by Francis Iles (perhaps my favourite crime story of all time), [[The Beast Must Die]] by Nicholas Blake and [[Green for Danger]] by Christianna Brand. There have always been a few books which I thought of as guilty pleasures - ones which I enjoyed but thought were essentially a little light on literary merit and I was surprised to find a couple of them in Keating's selection. I once read avidly through the whole of J J Marric's ''Gideon'' books and it was only when I read the review of [[Gideon's Week]] that I realised that Marric is another of the pseudonyms of the very prolific John Creasey.
