The best novels for learning how to write crime fiction

I’ve loved Le Carre’s books since The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and I’ve learned from each of them. I chose this one for several reasons. It was published in 2017, and I believe it was the last one published during his lifetime. One of his contributions is that he wrote the best interrogation scenes ever done, and this book is all interrogation. A favorite character, Peter Guillam is under investigation for his role in the events of the Cold War spying and those of George Smiley, Alec Leamas, et al. The book shows us in detail the deadly game of asking and answering, trying to give a questioner a sense of how things felt at a moment in the distant past without revealing deep personal feelings or criminal failings. 

I picked Thirteen Hours partly because it’s a good sample of the work of a major writer born, raised, and living in a part of the world different from ours. This book is probably the most suspenseful novel I’ve read in recent years, and it’s the novel I recommend to people who ask me how to write suspenseful books. Meyer is South African and writes in Afrikaans. It features Meyer’s great character Benny Griessel. The action is an American tourist running for her life from the people who killed her friend, and it’s one desperate chase that takes thirteen hours. 

This is only Patrick Hoffman’s second book, but it is a wonderful model of how to write a complex and controlled work without leaving loose ends, lingering too long in one phase, or letting the reader lose interest. The novel presents us with a drug cartel that stretches around the world like a giant organism. A single disturbance in one location causes violent and self-protective reactions in each of the other locations, like reflexes of the giant organism’s body. The novel is a brilliant study of cause and effect. Hoffman portrays a world that is dangerous and dark, but every bit of it makes sense.

This is a risky choice because the author is my old university colleague and later television writing partner, to whom I’ve been married for 41 years. I feel comfortable about it because of the number of fine British and American writers who have recommended this and her earlier books. I picked it because it’s the first novel I’ve read that makes a credible artistic attempt to grasp the experience of the current Pandemic. It’s a murder mystery that takes place during those first few months, when what was happening in the world seemed unthinkable, going out meant breaking a lockdown, and contact with anyone might be fatal. The amateur investigator, a young woman with an aimless and undisciplined past, takes a deep expedition into death, and it galvanizes her into taking charge and being really alive. 

This novel is now forty years old, but it’s such a marvelous piece of mystery writing that it’s still worth recommending to any aspiring novelist who hasn’t read it. This is the introduction of Cruz’s wonderful Russian cop, Arkady Renko, one of the best characters in crime fiction. Smith’s writing carefully and skillfully invokes for us a sense of Soviet-era society, the dangers lurking in it, both unique and universal, and shows us how Renko navigates his way through it all to find out what has happened and why. What this book should teach a writer is how well it pays off to really learn your craft and practice it in every word on every page.