You’ve got to root for the underdog, right? And there’s no bigger underdog than fictional villains. While real-life criminals are doing very nicely, thank you very much, in fiction, the bad guy is screwed from the start. What could be more relatable than knowing on a bone-deep, existential level that you’ve already lost? And what could be more heroic than stepping out onto the field of play knowing that no matter how hard you play, you’re still going down? Keep your flawed anti-heroes; they’re just too chicken to go over to the losing side. I’ll cheer for the doomed bad guy every single time.
I am haunted by the story that Richard Allen heard skinheads were a thing, went to a pub, bought a couple of local skinheads a few pints while he pumped them for stories and then went away and wrote Skinhead in a weekend.
A weekend?! It totally shows. Skinhead is as rough, nasty, and real as pulp fiction gets. Titular skinhead Joe Hawkins is a horrendously violent teenage thug, but beyond the aggro is a beautiful pen portrait of working-class London in the 70s. All chipped formica and smashed in faces.
It’s the sort of raw crime writing I find terrifying and compelling all at the same time. It’s so short, visceral, and urgent I inhaled it in one sitting.
Sixteen-year-old Joe Hawkins is the anti-hero’s anti-hero. His life is ruled by clothes, beer, football and above all violence – violence against hippies, authority, racial minorities and anyone else unfortunate enough to get in his way.
Joe is a London skinhead – a member of a uniquely British subculture which arose rapidly in the late 1960’s. While other skins were driven mainly by music, fashion and working-class pride, Joe and his mob use their formidable street style as a badge of aggressive rage, even while Joe dreams of making a better life for himself.
About halfway into Red Dragon, you meet Francis Dolarhyde, and from then on, the book is all his. Forget the FBI who are looking for him, the only person you care about is Dolarhyde, the serial killer who’s been brutally murdering entire families.
As far as I’m concerned, he’s the hero. Hannibal Lecter isn’t Thomas Harris’ best villain. It’s Dolarhyde. He’s everything Lecter isn’t. He’s awkward, shy, hates his body, hates himself and spends all his time stewing on his inadequacies. If I’ve got to pick between the Virgin Dolarhyde and the Chad Lecter, it’s Dolarhyde every time.
Deep down, he just wants to be loved, but the way he goes about it is almost comically misguided. Dolardhyde is on an impossible, bloody mission to fix himself, and no matter how many bodies he drops trying to do it, I’m always rooting for him to make it out the other end in one piece.
From the author of "Silence of the Lambs" and "Black Sunday", this is the book that introduces the most famous serial killer of them all - Hannibal Lecter.
I fell in love with the film and so was deeply relieved when I finally read the book and found out it was even better.
While there’s a horrendous moral misstep that sets things in motion, what I love is how well it captures that timeless, uncertain, motes-of-dust-in-the-sunlight feeling of a teenage, British summertime.
As the protagonists’ small, crumbling world slowly disintegrates around them, McEwan, the genius that he is, finds a universal sense of adolescent instability that keeps you on his side as things go horribly awry.
In the arid summer heat, four children - Jack, Julie, Sue and Tom - find themselves abruptly orphaned. All the routines of childhood are cast aside as the children adapt to a now parentless world. Alone in the house together, the children's lives twist into something unrecognisable as the outside begins to bear down on them.
I flit between literary fiction and crime fiction. I like my highbrow, all second-hand Penguin Modern Classics, and my lowbrow, all-half-inch-thick, pocket-sized books with photos of weapons on the front. But Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead is that rare beast of a bona fide literary writer doing a proper genre piece.
Janina Duszejko is an elderly, retired academic living alone in the middle of the wintery, Polish countryside. Alone but not lonely, surrounded by nature, astrology, and William Blake’s words, the book captures that beautiful, haunting quality of solitude and the compromises it brings. It also captures that slow, burning anger of someone who has long ago stopped caring what anyone else thinks.
Sure, there’s a murder plodding along in the background, but I was almost disappointed when it was solved because it meant leaving Janina and her Polish wilderness.
With DRIVE YOUR PLOW OVER THE BONES OF THE DEAD, Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Olga Tokarczuk returns with a subversive, entertaining noir novel. In a remote Polish village, Janina Duszejko, an eccentric woman in her sixties, recounts the events surrounding the disappearance of her two dogs. She is reclusive, preferring the company of animals to people; she's unconventional, believing in the stars; and she is fond of the poetry of William Blake, from whose work the title of the book is taken. When members of a local hunting club are found murdered, Duszejko becomes involved in the investigation. By…
Everyone loves a bastard, and Pinkie, the hero of Brighton Rock, is such an awful bastard. He doesn’t like his friends, hates his girlfriend, and is driven by a pathetically brittle ego that can never be satisfied. But it’s the fact he’s so hopelessly trapped in the prison of his own angry, petty horizons that makes me love him. I love a doomed character.
When an author can make you know, it’s all going to end badly and still make you hope it won’t? That’s magic. I love it when I’m reading books that I can feel playing with my emotions but I’m enjoying it so much I don’t care. Pinkie is a bastard, and he sort of knows it, when it comes to the crunch, and he goes out like a coward, I can’t help but wish he’d managed to pull it off.
Pinkie Brown, a neurotic teenage gangster wielding a razor blade and a bottle of sulfuric acid, commits a brutal murder - but it does not go unnoticed. Rose, a naive young waitress at a rundown cafe, has the unwitting power to destroy his crucial alibi, and Ida Arnold, a woman bursting with easy certainties about what is right and wrong, has made it her mission to bring about justice and redemption.
Set among the seaside amusements and dilapidated boarding houses of Brighton's pre-war underworld, Brighton Rock by Graham Greene is both a gritty thriller and a study of a soul…
Craig Malton solves crime for criminals. From missing drug shipments to missing body parts. When Manchester’s criminals need answers, they don’t go to the police. They go to Malton. So when violent, east-Manchester dealer Paul Bistacchi gets snatched up off his driveway, his wife puts in the call. It just so happens that the wife is Malton's ex - Keisha Bistacchi. Thirty years ago, Malton walked out on Keisha. Thirty years is a long time but Keisha is as patient as she is cunning as she is utterly, bloody ruthless.
Malton finds himself facing down old enemies, making a few new ones, and racing against the against the clock to find Keisha’s missing husband and prevent Manchester from erupting into a bloody gang war.
Too often, I find that novelists force the endings of their books in ways that aren’t true to their characters, the stories, or their settings. Often, they do so to provide the Hollywood ending that many readers crave. That always leaves me cold. I love novels whose characters are complex, human, and believable and interact with their setting and the story in ways that do not stretch credulity. This is how I try to approach my own writing and was foremost in my mind as I set out to write my own book.
The Oracle of Spring Garden Road explores the life and singular worldview of “Crazy Eddie,” a brilliant, highly-educated homeless man who panhandles in front of a downtown bank in a coastal town.
Eddie is a local enigma. Who is he? Where did he come from? What brought him to a life on the streets? A dizzying ride between past and present, the novel unravels these mysteries, just as Eddie has decided to return to society after two decades on the streets, with the help of Jane, a woman whose intelligence and integrity rival his own. Will he succeed, or is…
“Crazy Eddie” is a homeless man who inhabits two squares of pavement in front of a bank in downtown Halifax, Nova Scotia. In this makeshift office, he panhandles and dispenses his peerless wisdom. Well-educated, fiercely intelligent with a passionate interest in philosophy and a profound love of nature, Eddie is an enigma for the locals. Who is he? Where did he come from? What brought him to a life on the streets? Though rumors abound, none capture the unique worldview and singular character that led him to withdraw from the perfidy and corruption of human beings. Just as Eddie has…
