Books
Donna Leon: 7 of my favourite crime books
Before attempting to judge crime novels, I’ll confess that I now read very few, although I remember the ones that whammed me when I was younger. Lots of writers didn’t make it onto my list of favourites: certainly the blood-lovers didn’t; neither did the ones with gimmicks (the detective is a chef, tailor, gardener, jockey, forest ranger) or the ones written in short, declarative sentences. They grow boring. They are sloppy. I don’t read them.
Am I allowed to mention the crime stories I still cherish, many of which I’ve reread a number of times? Some aren’t novels, but they sure know about crime.
A Dark-Adapted Eye by Barbara Vine
A Dark-Adapted Eye by Barbara Vine
This is the first in what was to prove a long, and wonderful, series written by Barbara Vine, who is revealed from the beginning to be Ruth Rendell, writing books that are close observations of emotions and psychological distress. The first thing the narrator tells us is that Vera was going to die at a precise moment that day. Vera who? And for what? How can you not read the next sentence? And the next.
A Judgement in Stone by Ruth Rendell
A Judgement in Stone by Ruth Rendell
Only because it’s the best crime book I ever read, I include A Judgement in Stone, this one by the real Ruth Rendell, that begins by telling us that Eunice Parchman killed the Coverdale family because she couldn’t read or write. The reader, given the names of the murderer, victims, and motive, will still be glued to the book by the suspense of trying to find a way to save these poor, good people. Ruth Rendell save someone? Bah!
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
Raymond Chandler’s first crime book shines because of the voice of Philip Marlowe, who not only tells us the tangled story but does it like this: the orchids were “like the newly washed fingers of dead men”; “Carmen was small and delicately put together, but she looked durable”; “Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead.” Chandler once mused in a letter: “It doesn’t matter a damn what a novel is about. The only fiction of any moment in any age is that which does magic with words.” I tend to agree.
A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
A Thousand Acres doesn’t tell us there’s a crime until half-way through the book, then spends the rest showing how powerful is the need to deny that any crime has taken place. This is a powerful, unsettling book about what might at first seem to be about avarice but turns out to be about power. It’s frighteningly good.
Black Money by Ross Macdonald
Black Money by Ross Macdonald
Ross Macdonald’s protagonist, Lew Archer, gave readers a new vision of masculinity. Archer’s understanding of the broad expanse of human behaviour animates the terrible compassion and pity he has for the victims he sees all around him. It sometimes also forces him to feel the same emotions for the people who turn out to be the villains. I find him the most interesting, and certainly the most sympathetic, of the many heroes of crime fiction.
The Theban Plays (Oedipus Rex) by Sophocles
Oedipus the King (Oedipus Rex) by Sophocles
Yeah, yeah, I know – it’s a play and it’s 2,500 years old, but just think of the crime books you’ve read in which a parent is killed, where men are forced to realize their faults: arrogance, impatience, cowardice in the face of truth. Just imagine you’re reading this story for the first time and tell me the revelation wouldn’t shove you into the wall.
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Great Expectations is a crime novel, though the crime took place decades before the actions of the novel. The first scenes in the book describe the capture of an escaped prisoner, who lies in the wings for a few hundred pages and more than 20 years before returning both to England and to the novel to tell us more about the original crime. And die in an emotionally gooey scene that reduces me to a puddle of tears every time I read the book.
Don’t miss Donna Leon’s new book, A Refiner’s Fire
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Started out on Ross Macdonald nigh on 50 years ago and have read the majority – then revisited on audio in some cases. The all time peak of private eye fiction not to mention a time capsule of changing social attitudes in Southern California. Could Lew Archer have been in the audience at the Lighthouse, Hermosa Beach while tailing a ‘person of interest’ ? It’s a thought …….
My goodness! Donna Leon and I like Barbara Vine/Ruth Rendell! That’s made my day.