The best crime novels of the past 50 years

Elmore Leonard—in my opinion the greatest suspense writer of our time—called Higgins’ 1970 debut “the best crime novel ever written.” Higgins, who died in 1999, wrote three other crime novels I’d place in my top twenty-five, but this slim, taut misadventure of the eponymous Boston gun runner and police snitch takes the cake. Brutal, funny, and ultimately soul-crushing—most of it delivered in the underworld patois Higgins, a onetime criminal prosecutor, made his trademark—Eddie Coyle is simply as good as it gets. P.S. Robert Mitchum is spot on as doomed Eddie and Peter Boyle is perfect as one of Eddie’s “friends” in Peter Yates’ excellent 1973 film version of the book.

Just about any of Leonard’s several dozen suspense novels could have a top spot in this reckoning, including the better known Get Shorty, Freaky Deaky, and Glitz. My vote for the best goes, however, to Killshot, his dark, deftly plotted, highly comedic 1989 thriller about two bumbling killers and a ballsy middle-aged married couple the killers mistake for easy marks. Armand Degas, a soulful Ojibway known as the Blackbird, has grown tired of being a hit man for the Detroit mob. He’s befriended by a moronic thug named Richie Nix, whose bucket list includes robbing a bank in every state. When they decide that Carmen, a real estate agent, and her steelworker husband Wayne Colson hold the keys to a fortune, they learn that, like the Bible says, the wages of sin is death.  

Start with Willeford’s introduction of Freddy Frenger, “a blithe psychopath from California,” who blithely snaps the finger of a Hare Krishna in the Miami airport and launches himself, in league with an improbable prostitute who calls herself Pepper, on a diabolical spree of theft, murder, and debauchery. It also brings him face to face with one of fiction’s most memorable detectives, middle-aged, down-on-his-luck Hoke Moseley of the Miami P.D. Their cat-and-mouse game through the glitzy neighborhoods and seedy precincts of south Florida includes cons, graphic sex, and Hoke’s shattered dentures before the slippery monster from Out West gets his comeuppance. Funny, crude, and suspenseful, Miami Blues is impossible to put down.

For brilliant audacity, I know of no one who tells such pitch-black tales as audaciously or brilliantly as James Ellroy. Hard to pick a “best” from among a canon that includesThe Black Dahlia and The Big Nowhere, yet Tabloid, with its fearless reimagining of the skullduggery leading to John Kennedy’s assassination gets my vote. JFK, J. Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes, and Sam Ciancanna are among the flesh and blood characters mingling with Ellroy’s familiar fictional hoods, bent cops, sleazy newspapermen, and easy women. Ellroy’s unrelenting rat-a-tat style—“The dope hit home. Big Howard went slack-faced”—takes some getting used to, but the pace and language grab you by the throat and don’t let go. You’re equal parts exhausted and exhilarated at story’s end. 

An accomplished author of imaginative thrillers and police procedurals, Mina here draws on the actual case of 1950s Scottish mass murderer Peter Manuel and conjures up a complex fictional context that transforms the factual account into noir art (2017). Her gritty pre-urban renewal Glasgow demonstrates how a story’s setting can be as vivid and determinant as its human characters. Running nearly the length of its lean narrative is a murder trial that throws a harsh light on conflicting strata of the city’s brutally misogynistic society, from its corrupt business elite to its grimy criminal underbelly. When the drama is over and the perpetrator is hanged, Mina tells us, everything returns to its depressing normal and the murders become just “a creepy story about a serial killer.” Actually, in Mina’s hands, it's much more than that.